Reading your post, I can envision the scene you were grappling with, even though I am only vaguely familiar with Wellington and the harbour area!
"Surreal sunsets and sunrise"?? "Explosive sunsets and sunrises..." Jeez, you been watching too many Hollywood hitters!?
But to the answer: Dunno, I'm usually looking the other way (more about this in a bit!...)
Although I am active in the sunrise and sunset hours, I am pointing my camera the other way --
east! No great ball of fire there, of course, but this is where the soft, beautiful pastel tones of the afterglow (the correct terminology is the
Rise of the Belt of Venus and
Earth's Shadow which progressively becomes thicker and higher after sunset in the west, until it peeters out into a deep then dusky mauve and blue then to darkness). And here's the thing: if you want to, you can actually meter this arty-farty display (the colours, not the plain sky).
New Zealand, like Australia, is bathed in the white glare of a southern temperate light, longer in the morning and shorter in the evening.That is to say, places like the Southern Alps are especially difficult to meter and photograph well at sunrise and sunset because of the big variation in contrast of shadowed foregrounds and brightly illuminated backgrounds (of mountains, mountains and yet more mountains!). I recall [New Zealand photographer] Craig Potton telling me in 2006 that virtually all of his images of the Southern Alps in his book required "reworking" because of the difficulty of the exposure (he used Ektachrome and Kodachrome).
It seems you were having an extreme confrontation with the light; I've been there, done that too (in 35mm). Velvia
cannot take in that much variation in contrast (+/- 2 stops in bright point light, rising to 6.5 stops in overcast to flat light; to 8 stops for Provia 100F). The solution is not more and many ND filters, but finding the right balance of light. No, we can't play God and request a Command Performance, but we can only hope!
I avoid sunrise and sunsets because of the extreme contrast that
Velvia 50 (particularly) is not able to satisfactorily handle, and I don't waste time trying to get a leg over it.
How the camera meters vs
other options also matters. I do not use in-camera metering (which is rudimentary 50-year old tech!), but multispot-mean weighted averaged metering with shift of the mid-tone. What are you using, and how?
Compromise of your scene (beside abandonment, as a last, teary-eyed resort!) is likely; rather than vast open spaces of contrasty (black) nothingness, scout around to include a particularly striking or worthwhile central point of interest in the frame, and let the sunrise or sunset take back seat to that, but I strongly suspect the camera will blow out the background completely in order to bring up the foreground correctly -- this is what I am reading. My solution would be to go out there immediately after a storm (a typical New Zealand 'southerly clearance', in Kiwi-speak!) when the light is software and the contrast lower. I had one such situation at Milford Sound in 2015, emerging from the camper after 48 hours stuck in it because of the storm. The fiery red glow over Mitre Peak was a sight to behold yet it lasted all of 3 minutes and I had to settle for a a glow more orange then fiery!
My methodology with multispot metering is to
never meter the sky unless it has a very definite interest and/or variation in tonality e.g. clouds that are backlit by the sun, creating the 'tiara effect'. It is a dreadful coincidence that at the time of writing this, 90km away in Melbourne I have a couple of slides being printed that would demonstrate where the emphasis is put in a scene where both the main subject and patterned sky are competing for attention.
...sorry folks) but from my experience you can totally forget shots of 3stops underexposure with c41 because it is outside of tollerance of modern films.
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