Pink Skies In January.

Looking east over the Los Angeles basin during the last hours of daylight often shows a pink ambience to the sky and city beneath it.



It happens every winter in Los Angeles. It's caused by a combination of recurring events. The sun's position changes during the year as we all know and in the winter it is at its southern most position. The sun sets around 5pm in Los Angeles in January and still before 6 in February. That combined with the suns rays travelling through the atmosphere and the dirt in Los Angeles' atmosphere produces this pink color this time of year.

This is from January 10 of this year.



It is the same every year. This is college crew team rowing in the same area in January of 2007.



Actually it's not just January but early February as well. Here's one from February of 2008.



This was shot on the back of the Santa Monica Pier. The crosses on the beach are for the dead U.S. soldiers in Iraq. This is about the sky though and NOT intended as a political statement. There are other blogs for politics all over the internet. All I was intending here was to show the eastern Los Angeles sky as being pink in the winter.

White balance does come into play of course as I tend shoot on the blue side more often than not. However warming up the white balance only makes it appear more towards orange but pink just the same.

A little bit on processing - generally I use photomatix to generate HDR's unless the alignment is terribly off, then I use Photoshop CS4. In the last two I used lightroom to generate multiple EV's for the HDR as each was a single RAW file. All were tonemapped in photomatix and edited in photoshop for exposure, sharpness and noise removal.