There are several advantages to shooting when the sun is close to the horizon. The color of the light is warm, texture is more pronounced, and shadows, when present, are long which adds to the graphic design of an image. When photographing wildlife, a low sun makes the colors in the eyes super saturated, and the eyelids don’t cause shadows that obscure the eyes. In this picture of a black wolf, you can see a very narrow shadow that crosses the pupil. This occurred because the sun was low but it wasn't touching the horizon. It was about an hour and a half before sunset. Wolves have ultra intense eyes, and in this instance I think the partial shadow connotes the ferocious and predatory nature of this animal. My settings were 1/800, f/10, and 400 ISO, and I used a 400mm focal length for the shot. For the metering, given much of the center of the frame was very dark or black, I studied the first test shot on the LCD screen and tweaked the exposure using the exposure compensation feature. This picture is underexposed -- based on the meter reading -- by 2/3 f/stop.
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