Behind the Scenes: Photographing Santorini’s Famous Sunset

Until last week, I hadn’t set foot outside the UK since taking a short weekend break to Lisbon in February 2020 - as many of you will know from my previous travel escapades, such a long travel absence is very unusual for me! I wasn’t convinced my husband and I would make it to the Greek island of Santorini until we were actually sitting on the airplane at Heathrow, complete with our passports, boarding cards and of course our newly acquired NHS Covid Travel Passes. Is this the new normal, we wondered?!

Whilst Santorini has long been on my bucket list, this was in more ways than one going to be a special trip; not only was it our first holiday abroad in so long, it was booked to celebrate my 36th birthday as well as being our final chance at a holiday for just the two of us, with our daughter being expected to arrive in early February next year - a ‘babymoon’ I believe is the correct term!

The plan was to have plenty of time to relax, but of course my camera, filters and tripod were firmly on my list of items to pack - I wasn’t going to miss my chance at photographing the world-famous Oia sunset. Staying in Oia itself, we arrived with not much time to spare on the first evening to make it into position (and thankfully the sunset fizzled out anyway after the massive red sun disappeared behind a low bank of cloud on the horizon). So on the second evening, after a lazy couple of hours at the pool and 45 minutes before sunset, we made our way from the hotel up the many stone steps to Oia Castle, the viewpoint I had located to capture the iconic skyline shot with the hillside dotted with its whitewashed cave houses.


When we arrived it was already quite crowded with people waiting with great anticipation as the sun was lowering in the sky, so I took a few handheld shots whilst the sun cast its warm yellow glow on the buildings. Using filters, taking handheld shots at lower light levels makes it slightly trickier as it lessens the amount of light able to reach the sensor. I bumped my iso up to 200 and used an aperture of f13 with a shutter speed of 10th of a second - about my limit for keeping the camera steady enough. There was a breeze coming off the sea from the west and I could see some low clouds that had built up now being blown towards the town. I got excited hoping they would arrive into my frame and catch some colour as the sun started to set. It wasn’t meant to be, but after the sun had dipped below the horizon and the crowd started to dissipate, out came my tripod to capture some longer exposures of the scene with the post-sunset colour and twinkling lights that had now started to illuminate the town. Here is the resulting shot and let’s just say the Oia sunset lived up to my expectations!


A little note on filters - I use the LEE 100 system with the circular polariser and 0.9 ND Grad and are one of those photographers that tends to use them all the time. My opinion on this is that if the light is right to allow polarisation then the polariser will work its magic, I just compensate by using longer shutter speeds and feel that this combination can really bring out some magical colours at sunrise and sunset.

And given this is more of a personal post, here are a few iphone photos from that afternoon and evening.