Sunrises come in all different varieties -- that's why I like shooting them. Most of the time, if they're good, you get about 20 minutes worth of shooting: 10 minutes before actual sunrise to 10 minutes after. Depending on how the clouds are working, you can get nothing or a lot. I've had some of both over the past few years that I have been visiting Cutler Park at dawn. Today, it was six minutes of awesome sky.
When I woke up this morning a little before 4:00a, I could see a half moon barely visible behind clouds slowly moving across the sky, which didn't bode well for good photo opportunities when the sun rose about 5:30a. But I figured I could always return home and go back to bed if it didn't work out.
Got to Cutler about 5:00a, and the sky was overcast -- not solid, but wall-to-wall -- not good. At that point, it looked like this:
The whole sky slowly got lighter, but it was still pretty gloomy. (For those of you not interested in the technicalities, please forgive the following digression: I was at ISO 2000 and shooting mostly 1/60th at f/5.6.) The texture of the clouds was interesting, and there were occasional gaps where lighter streaks emerged, but they were far away and not in the right place for sunrise.
After fifteen minutes or so, it seemed like nothing was going to happen. At 5:18a the horizon looked like this:
So I turned and started shooting toward the southeast, where there was a little more light. A couple of minutes later, at 5:22a, I turned back toward the place where I knew the sun was supposed to be and saw this:
Whoa! Where did THAT come from?
I rapidly re-set my camera settings and started shooting: single frames; multi-frames for panoramas I would stitch together later; wide shots; tight shots; longer exposure; shorter exposure. I had to grab this, because I knew it wouldn't last long. Six minutes later, it was over. Here's how it looked:
5:23am
5:24am
5:25am
5:26am
5:27am
That was it -- all in about six minutes. While it was happening it felt like about two minutes. Then, 30 minutes later, the universe provided a grace note:
If you'd like to see the whole sequence in larger format (plus a few different views of the scene), here's a link to the gallery on my photography website, Hastings Street Photography:
Six Minutes of Awesome Sky
Enjoy!
