Gallery Photo – ‘Sunrise’

It seems that these days sunrise and sunset photographs aren’t quite as popular as they once were in the photography community. I can’t think why given that mother nature presents us with some marvellous photographic opportunities. This photograph is one taken in a similar position about this time last year. The change into autumn sees the appearance of mist and fog and I think it just adds drama to any composition. In this case just blending the field into the hedge in the foreground and then blending the first tree line into the group of trees in the background.

The key to a good sunrise shot, other than getting up early to take the photographs of course is to ensure the sun and the sky don’t get burnt out and overexposed. To avoid this you may need a graduated filter, or as in this case take a bracketed set of three shots, to either ensure one is well exposed, or to combine them later in photoshop and create a mask to reveal only those parts of the photograph you need.

As you can see from the metadata below the scene itself was actually quite bright allowing a fast shutter speed and allowing the camera to be hand-held. If I’d arrived at the scene half an hour earlier I think I would have needed a tripod to avoid any camera shake. Bearing in mind I almost always use a cable release when the camera is mounted this way to avoid my pushing of the shutter button to add any further vibration.

Technical Details

ISO 200, 105mm, f8, 1/320 sec

Tools Used

Lightroom 3 , and Photoshop. In Photoshop I created a graduated layer to just darken down the top of the sky.