As waterfalls dried up in late fall throughout Arkansas, my attention turned to sunrises and sunsets. Following are some tips on taking photos of these color splashes.

With these low-light conditions, you will need a tripod, or at least to set your camera on something.

Positioning yourself so the sun rises or sets over water gives you more reflections to work with, but clouds are more important. Without clouds, you'll still get a warm orange/red glow, but only a few angular degrees above the horizon -- about the height of your outstretched hand and thumb. If you find interesting foreground that high, say a crooked tree in the distance, you can zoom in with a lens (100 mm or greater) to frame that and then a cloudless sunrise or sunset may work.

With clouds, things can get more spectacular, but you'll need a gap between the horizon and the clouds. The sun sinking into ground fog or a marine layer is a fizzle. With that gap below thick cumulus clouds or just a smattering of wispy cirrus clouds, the sun's reflected rays pick up color from land, water, and all that extra air it has to pass before painting the undersides of the clouds.

Keep in mind that this cloud reflection lasts as short as 10 minutes after the sun dips below the horizon. If you're behind buildings or in a valley, much of it will be hidden behind the mountains.

A sunrise/sunset without interesting foreground is a kiss on the cheek instead of the lips. Almost any foreground can do, and you just have to let your creative juices flow and see what is available. Sunsets are a bit easier for this since you're scampering around looking while the sun is up instead of tripping around in the dark before the sunrise.

The foreground should usually work as a silhouette, with the details your eye can see gone, but there is a trick to overcome this if you know how to superimpose images. I will often take a shot with some fading foreground detail, even if that shot overexposes the sunset itself, and then merge the two shots later in Photoshop. The result is closer to what your eye can do, that amazing camera with more dynamic range using Jello than the ones Canon and Nikon have built with their billions of research bucks.

Post-processing goes beyond merging shots, for example, vibrance, contrast, saturation, and brightness adjustments, filters like NIK's detail extractor, and Gaussian blur to lose the cloud noise, but that's a whole other topic.

A great way to practice is to watch sunrises and sunsets, but first forming a mental image of how you expect it to go, and then watching to see how your predictions turn out. See how long things take, usually faster than you'll expect once the show gets underway.

Safety tip: staring at the sun, even near the horizon, will toast the rods and cones of your eyes. Mucho bad. A quick sideways glance through sunglasses is all you'll ever need.