Industry Signal

How to Fake a Sunset When the Sky Gives You Nothing

November 8, 2026 · 4 min read
How to Fake a Sunset When the Sky Gives You Nothing
In short: Underexpose the gray ambient first, then place one warm gelled flash low behind the couple, just out of frame. A half CTO gel and a warmer white balance sell the sunset, and foreground grass shot through at a wide aperture turns into glowing blur that does most of the convincing.

What does the setup actually look like?

Wedding photographer Neil Redfern faced a gray day with rain coming and going, and an evening portrait slot with no sunset in sight. His answer was one light: a Godox AD200 with a half CTO gel, on a very tall stand behind the couple, standing in for a low sun. He placed the couple in a clear patch of field, crouched low, and shot through the long grass at f/1.2. The out-of-focus blades catch the warm light and turn into glowing blur, which sells the sunset. He takes a frame first with the flash trigger off to check the ambient exposure, which he calls layer one, and only then fires the flash.

Why does flash sync matter here?

Redfern was shooting Sony a9 III bodies, and their global shutter is doing quiet work here. It syncs flash at any shutter speed, up to 1/80,000 of a second, so he can pair a fast shutter with a wide-open aperture and still get the flash's full output. On a conventional shutter, going past the sync speed means high-speed sync, which pulses the flash and costs a lot of its effective power. The principle holds whatever you shoot with: underexpose the ambient first, then let one warm, hard light from behind define the frame.

How do you keep it from looking fake?

Placement is the difference between a sunset and a flash in a field. When the light appears in the frame, it looks obviously fake. When it sits just past the top edge, the light reads as sun, so Redfern raised the stand to its full height to keep the head out of the shot. He also warmed the white balance, from his usual 5,800 K up to 7,000 K. And the look comes together more easily at 85mm or 135mm than at 50mm, where the wider view takes in more of the ordinary field.

Why it matters for you

Every photographer eventually gets the gray day, the flat sky, the portrait slot that cannot move. The lesson is not to buy a Godox AD200. It is to think in layers: ambient first, then one light with a job. A single gelled flash, a low angle, and a foreground you shoot through will rescue more evenings than a bag full of modifiers used at random.

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