The Trouble with Sunrises

I couldn’t sleep properly last night and woke up really early with a whole bunch of stuff racing through my head – to the point that I figured I may as well get up since it was clear to me I wasn’t going back to sleep.

So what do you do if you get up at about 5am for no good reason? Well, if you’re a photographer you could go take some photos of the sunrise…

That’s what I decided to do – I figured I’d take a short drive to the beach and get some of those nice ‘beach sunrise’ shots – which brings me to the trouble with sunrises…

I’m pretty certain I’m in good company amongst my fellow photographers when I confess that I’ve taken more sunset photos than I can count and yet I can count the sunrises I’ve shot on one hand.

Why? A couple of reasons:

The first problem is if you want to photograph the sunrise you have to get up before sunrise – sometimes alot before if you want to travel to somewhere nice to shoot it. Now this can be kind of inconvenient, unpleasant and uncomfortable – especially in winter. Today none of these applied to me – I was up and awake and it was a mild summer morning.

The second problem is that it’s almost impossible to forecast or even guess ahead of time whether the sunrise is going to be one worth getting up for to shoot.

With sunsets presumably most folk will have been out of bed for a while and by watching the skies leading up to sunset anyone can get a reasonable idea of whether it’s going to be an ‘event’ or a ‘non-event’.

Not so with sunrises. It’s pretty much pot luck. Did I get lucky this morning? Nup. When I left for the short drive there were a few stars visible and some cloud – it looked like it might be worth it…

However, by the time the sun was due to come up the sky was blanketed with thick, grey clouds and as far as I could tell it ended up looking like the sun slept in and got up an hour and a half late – it wasn’t ’til then that I finally saw some light burst through the cloud cover. And that was about ten minutes before the storm and the rain rolled in… Maybe I should have stayed in bed.

That said, the morning wasn’t a total waste – I still took some shots, of course, I mean, I had my camera with me and there’s always something to shoot. I thought these shots were interesting in a kind of abstract way:

Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think.