Daybreak
The Making Of A Sunrise Shot

Photo by Kevin Carden

Sunrises are probably the single most photographed occurrences in nature, and it isn't hard to see why. Fantastic colors light the entire sky even an hour before sunrise, filled with cool tones of blue and purple. And then the sun reaches the horizon and highlights the entire landscape. And in a short ten minutes, the sun is so bright you cannot look at it anymore. This brief period of time is the best opportunity for some good quality photographs.

This photograph was taken at the Kure Beach Pier, about 15 miles south of Wilmington, in North Carolina. (Kure is pronounced "cure-ree", by the way). Sunrise was at 7:05 a.m., which meant for me waking up at about 45 minutes earlier and heading down to the pier. I set up my tripod and my Canon 5D, along with my 17-40mm Canon L lens. I never try to shoot landscapes without this wide angle lens, especially sunrises and sunsets.

The main problem with sunrises, is the difference of light available in the sky and the ground. The rising sun lights up the entire sky, with little of it reaching the landscape. You can focus your camera on the sky to capture the accurate color of the clouds and rays of sunlight, but then the ground is completely in the shadows. Or you could focus on the ground to reveal the landscape, and the sky is washed out. Our human eyes are amazing at being able to fix this big range of light, but even the most advanced cameras cannot get it down. I knew about this problem of course, before I started shooting this sunrise. But my plan was to get three identical shots of the sunrise, with three different exposure readings. This is called bracketing, and every SLR has it in its menu.

My goal was simple for the shot. I wanted to include the sunrise over the ocean, with the fishing pier and surf as the foreground. This shot is about 5 minutes after the sun rose from the horizon, and is nearing its full brightness. So I made sure I got my composition right, and snapped the three images:

+1 EV	-0.3 EV	-1.7 EV

Those are the three original shots straight from the camera. The first shot is probably the best version my camera created, but it lacks detail in the sky and the clouds around the actual sun. The second two shots capture the great orange and brown hues around the sun and the wispy clouds in the sky. I could just pick one of these shots and settle with it, but I wanted to blend the good qualities of all three. For this I needed special HDR software. I use PhotoMatix by HDRSoft, but there are other great programs out there. It simply combines the highlights and the shadows of bracketed shots, creating a well-balanced composition. Here is what it came up with:

 

The image is well balanced, but lacks any saturation of the colors. I adjust the hues and the tones a bit and come up with this version:

I noticed that there was too much sky in the photo, so I cropped about 20% of the sky off. I also changed the white balance to accentuate the cool blue tones from the sunrise. I also toned down the excessive saturation levels to create a more realistic color scheme. Now I have a pretty good image, with the tones around the sky and the foreground in balance. All that's left now is a little bit of post-processing.

Rule of Thirds: This rule simply asks that you divide up your image into three vertical and horizontal sections, like a tic-tac-toe board, and to put the subject at the intersections of these lines. The common temptation for many photographers is to put the subject dead center into the image. This might work well for some images, but most nature shots work best with an off-center subject. I try to observe this rule as often as possible, so I placed my new image in a tic-tac-toe board to see how it was going:

As you can see, the subject of my photo (the sun), is close to being located in the intersection of the lines. The other subject (the pier), is also pretty close to being in the intersection. But to make this photo as aesthetic as possible, I decide to crop the image, so that the intersections perfectly match up with the lines.

Now both subjects, the pier and the sun, are perfectly in the crosshairs of the lines. Another good attribute I tried to convey here was the diagonal of the pier. The eyes always tend to follow the diagonals in pictures, especially when they intersect other lines found in the shot. This photo has two diagonals, the pier and the receding waves on the sand:

Well now I am pleased with my shot, and I come up with a title for it and place it on a black background. This is probably one of my favorite sunrise shots, and I hope to get a lot more in the future. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact me.

 

 

 

Daybreak
Photographed by Kevin Carden
February 8th, 2009
Kure Beach, North Carolina