Behind the Lens: Chasing the morning light

Sunrise at Guls Rock

As a photographer it is always a hard decision on deciding the location and the time of the shoot, I have always preferred sunsets as they give us a lot more time to reach the location and we get a lot more time to shoot at a location, however recently I have been putting in the effort to get up early in the morning and going out for a sunrise shoot. It gets really tight and there is no guarantee that we will have a stunning sunrise, plus the window where we get all the crazy colours is really small sometimes only a couple of minutes.

Planning the shoot: Sunrise colours are really intense there is a lot going on during the sunrise, and we need meticulous planning to get the best shots in the short window, so it is always advisable to reach the location at least 40 mins before the sunrise, so that we get set and are all ready when the sky starts lighting up. If you are planing to get dramatic shots make sure you plan the day where there are a few clouds and the wind speed is very low, so that you can get stable shots on a tripod.

Getting the Shot: When at location I always pull out my phone to check composition in the wide and ultra wide lens to check which will look good. Getting those colours is important and I need to know where the sun is going to rise from there are plenty of apps to get, Lumous is a really good app, you don’t want to be shooting directly at the sun for the colours you need to be facing away from it, I use my Sony Gmaster 16-35 or 24-70 Lens for most of my compositions, but recently have started using the 70-200 for some interesting compositions, some of the examples are attached below. One quick tip is to get a polariser filter so that you can cut the reflections and for the colours to pop.

This image was shot on the 70-200 GM

Get those Angles: When you are shooting any scene with water I always make sure that I am much closer to the ground and have a wide angle lens this helps me get a sense of scale and makes any object that is closer to the lens much bigger and grander, For example in the image below the rocks in the foreground look really big, but in reality they are really small and ordinary rocks, using the wider 24mm gives the image a much bigger scale.