For dusk or dawn scenes, it’s really quite simple. There are couple of things you can do. One thing is very easy. Just turn your mode dial to the scene mode, right here—that SCN that stands for scene and in this mode you can choose sunset. So go ahead and press set to set the sunset mode and what this is going to do, its going to force the ISO to 100 which is great and its going to set a very, very warm tone for the white balance. By default, the focusing is set to the multi focusing mode which is fine because you’re taking a landscape so you don’t really need to focus on anything in particular. It just needs to be far away.

So go ahead and press the shutter button halfway. The camera will find its focus point and then you can just press the shutter button the rest of the way to take the picture. Now, if you don’t like the warming effect the camera puts on the sunset pictures, what you can do is turn your mode dial back to the program mode. So that’s a P and in the back, set your ISO to 100. This will get you the cleanest image possible and that’s exactly what you want for dusk and dawn pictures. Press ISO right here. Make sure 100 is selected. You can use your left and right navigation buttons to move around if you need to, press set and then in the white balance, press WB over here.

If you want accurate colors, I would say, go with daylight. That’s going to get you the most accurate colors out of the sky. If you do want to warm it up a little bit, you can choose cloudy or shade or warm it up even more. If you want to go to extremes, you can choose to set the Kelvin temperature yourself. Right now, mine is set to 2500 and you can see everything is very, very blue. So if you want to have more cool blue tone into your skies or enhance those colors, then you would choose a very low case setting.

In order to set the Kelvin, go ahead and press the up navigation button as it indicates down here and now, I can use the up and down navigation buttons to change this setting or I can use my dial up here in the front to change the setting as well. So I’ll just go all the way up. I can go up to 10,000 and this will give me the warmest color as possible. This is probably what the automatic setting is set to two. So if you want to change that, you can just go down a bit if that’s too much and just set it to whatever you think is really the best. You’ll be able to see the effect in the screen on the back.

Once you have it set, go ahead and press set. Now, with the ISO set to 100, go ahead and press the shutter button halfway to see what your settings are set to. Mine are currently set to F6.3 and my shutter speed is set to 200 of a seconds. 6.3 is probably okay. It’ll get me a descent depth of field but if I want, what I can do is release the shutter button at this point and use my dial up here to change that setting. Move it up a little bit. Remember as long as my shutter speed is faster than 160th of a second, I can handhold this shut without a problem.

So I’ll increase this and I can go up to F11 and this will give me a wider depth of field which will get more of the picture in focus and since this is a landscape or taking a picture off, this is probably what we want. Keep in mind, shifting the program settings as I did here, it only works when the ISO is not set to intelligent ISO. So make sure your ISO is set properly to 100 or 200 and then you’ll be able to shift the program settings.

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