Worth waking up for

I just got back from watching the sun rise down at my local beach.

Of course I had my camera with me, so here's the first shot I've processed.

Driving there pre-dawn, I didn't think there would be much colour in the sky since directly above me was clear sky and on the horizon was a thick band of dark cloud.

But by the time I arrived and set up my tripod I had a pretty good feeling that the clouds would move just in time to create something special.

And it turns out it was a really nice golden sunrise. Well worth waking up early for.

I exposed this shot with a 1/10th of a second shutter speed, which was just slow enough to capture the motion in the wave without being so slow that the water lost all definition.

The speed the waves travel through the frame ultimately determine the required shutter speed for this effect.

The faster the wave is moving and/or the closer it is to your lens, the faster the shutter speed.

The slower and/or the further away the wave, the slower the shutter speed.

Just like on most seascape shoots where the wave is a crucial part of the composition, it took quite a few attempts to get the "perfect" wave.

But I settled on this one as my "keeper" because of how it virtually mirrors the shape of the cloud in the sky, which I find quite interesting.

When it came to processing the image, I didn't have to do much to alter the colours because the warm golden light came through quite well in the RAW files.

The first task was to blend two exposures (a darker one for the sky, a lighter one for the foreground) and then enhance the contrast throughout the image to let the existing colours come through and shine.

After that it was just a formality :-)

Cheers!

Steve