In a blog that I have published earlier I asked a question of myself. Why do you like photography. One of the reasons is it gets you out in the fresh air.
Well the sunrises which make up this blog certainly did that. In the first two I managed to get them towards the end of summer when the weather was clement and quite warm, or relatively warm. I didn’t know quite what to expect in future and as I write the first part of this blog with the first two sunsets in the can. It is mid September and already I have donned jumpers and today I went out at ten am with a jumper and a Barbour wax jacket on. The wind is off the north east, a cold direction, and I am planning a third tomorrow morning and I need to be in place, camera ready, by about six fifteen am; so at the site by five forty five, no later. It will get later the longer the year goes on.
My first session was at East Lane Bawdsey. Why was that the first, No stronger answer than it was. I did think Shingle Street but I am a little fickle. It was a landscape photographers dream morning with a mist laying across the fields up to about second story hight. I did get a picture of Found Tower in the mist (Martello Tower X) looking north and the very cute holiday home had a mist to her waist hight. Not a photo for this blog. Fickle’ish! The nice thing about getting out before sunrise is that a) there are very few cars on the road and b) car parks are empty. The first sunrise was taken on the sea wall just south of the Tower. I parked up in the dark put my head torch on and dragged me and my camera bag onto the sea wall by the old gun emplacement.
Sunrise East Lane Bawdsey
Walking along the sea wall in a gentle mist with just a few swans for company gliding around lagoon to the north of the old look out tower. The swans, the occasional call of a bird and the honks of a arrow head of geese making their way to their unknown destination were my only companions on that morning and there is nothing better than being alone with the prospect of a good image.
As I reached the part of the river wall where the caisson has been let back, so that it is almost below where you walk, the waves sound like distant thunder as they push onto the rocks below. It is almost light.
If you look up the definition of sunrise you will find that there are a number of dawns, astronomical, nautical and civil. These all relate to the amount that the sun is below the horizon. I was out in the civil dawn and it was soon light enough to allow me to walk down the sea wall to my chosen location discarding my headtorch. I took out my camera set up my tripod and shot a few frames of the Martello Tower and then the wait. There is a lot of waiting in the realm of landscape photography and that is mostly after you have chosen your shot.
Choosing your shot needs visits to the site, planning and then the travel. Most of the waiting is for the light to change. Being old with creaky knees I have bought a collapsible plastic stool to sit on while I am waiting for the light of the sunrise to peak over the horizon. As the clock ticked to the published sunrise time I got a little excited with a hope that the clouds, which can appear upon the horizon at dawn and cover the main act, did not materialize. Fortunately the cloud, if it was there and there is a hint in my shot, did not hide the source of of joy and sorrow, depending on what you are hoping for, and the sun appeared on time and lit up the lagoon that l reflected the the jet trails of the early morning airliners that come in and out from the London airports. I was a little pleased with the shot, not the best of work but it did not need much post processing to get to the vision that appeared to my eye. A lot of landscape photographers will decry things like jet trails and other human interventions in their images but to me they are part of the scene and what I see with my eye.
Shingle Street
My second trip was out to one of my favourite places on the Peninsula and was one we visited before we moved here. It is special to me. Famous, eerie in some lights and definitely photogenic I made my way to Shingle Street at some time before dawn and arrived at the small carpark. set back from the shingle bank. To my surprise the carpark had a number of cars with the individual drivers retrieving backpacks from boots. ‘Those look like photography gear backpacks’ I thought. As a landscape photographer no longer do you just take a camera out with you. You need a hell of a lot more of kit than that. A camera, maybe two, a number of lenses, filters, remote shutter releases, lens cleaners and so on. The amount of gear you take is only restricted by the size of your back back. These guys had big packs and the last car to arrive was one I thought I recognised and it contained my favourite East Anglian Professional Photographer, Gill Moon. Then it occurred to me; she must be on a Sunrise Workshop and the backpackers were her students. I made my apologies for the coincidence and promised to keep out of their way. There is nothing more frustrating than someone getting in the way of your image. OK you can take them out in Photoshop in post processing but I try not to do too much of that.
I did want to take my photo of the sunrise over the lagoon to get a similar look and feel to my first image, but fair play I did want to keep out of their view finders so I made my way a little south avoiding another small lagoon and got closer to the sea to await the sunrise.
My time was spent checking my settings against a stand alone light meter, something I am trying out, and hoping that the veil of cloud that hung over the horizon was mist seen through distance, and not an actual cloud bank that was going to spoil my view of the sun. Dawn approached and then passed and not a sign of the golden orb that I hoped was going to grace my sensor. I was just about to pack up with no sign when my second image above presented itself. The sun broke through whatever clag hung over the horizon. I am no meteorologist but it looked like mist getting thinner the higher it got and that is how the sun appeared, partially hidden.
As she got higher the more she revealed of herself and there she was in image three below and much to my relief. I walked back to my car, past the student photographers and a set of ladies about to take a dip in the lagoon that I originally wanted to photograph over. It was not even seven o clock. I know it can be exhilarating taking a dip in freezing cold water but I will avoid this and save my thrills for getting the perfect, or perfect for me, landscape photo. The lack of a sun would have made this a difficult session and then on the way back in my car I considered what I would have done had the sun not appeared through the mist. Was a picture a sunrise picture without a sun. Then I made a decision for future sessions, take pictures at sunrise with or without the sun showing. They are still valid. Oh and looking at the picture below I need to make sure I clean my lenses and sensor before a shoot. It is all learning.
Shingle Street a few minutes later
My next trip was to Orford and it was on a cold day. Part of my equipment is a pair of very good gloves where the fore finger and thumb ends flip up revealing the bare finger so that you can work the camera controls including the touch screen which can control focus and release the shutter. That day I thought, ‘I don’t need gloves it is not that cold’. Bit silly really because the temperature was hovering around 5 degrees C and yes, it was cold enough to freeze my fingers. Once cold, putting fingers in gloves does not warm them up. I think that it keeps them colder. Still I was quite hopeful that the sun was going to show herself despite the cloud or mist on the horizon. Set up and settings checked I stood on the boat ramp and tried to warm my poor hands up by taking my gloves off and putting them in my trouser pockets. It is just me or does having cold hands make the rest of your body cold. Unlike Bawdsey there were more people about at that ungodly hour of the morning. One lady, a birder I think, walked back and forth along the quay with a pair of binoculars. Two rather senior ladies with small dogs came over the bank from the direction of the carpark and passed the time of day with me. I had to smile because one of the ladies’ dogs drunk lustily from a puddle. Really, was it that thirsty!
Sunrise Orford Quay
Sunrise Orford Quay Different View
Looking out to the sunrise location I could see a bank of cloud and this was definitely cloud so my hopes of a sunrise photo with a sun were looking poor. Past sunrise and still no sun and then along came a large four by four with a lady and a man who jumped out and held their phones towards the emerging brightness. “Don’t often get that.” the guy said and I took my photos which was some minutes after actual sunrise, but they will have to do. I could have waited for the full sun to emerge but I was too cold to do any more and anyway that would have been well after sunrise. So there we have it the closest I was going to get to a sunrise that day.
My next venue was going to be Bawdsey Quay which I did twice. The first was without planning and I decided to go out the night before without checking the weather and thought that if the sun was not going to show herself I would do a dawn long exposure where with a ND filter which blocks out a lot of light allowing you to use a long exposure blurring an moving things like clouds, leaves or water. Needless to say the sky was cloud bound with very little definition. Blank sky which if you listen to professional photographers on YouTube vlogs they will always complain about the flat light that this type of cloud cover gives but I was undaunted, I was going to use my new filter set at dawn. I drove the lonely ten minutes, past the campervans on the side of the River Deben to the quay carpark. Apart from some overnight vehicles the small car park was mostly empty and I parked near the edge of the quay grabbed my back pack and set to walk to my chosen location along the foot path. My headtorch was a necessity at that time of the morning because the path goes though bushes on one side and a chain link fence on the other and there are a number of obstacles; old and rusting meatal structures. Not sure if they were the remnants of river defences or WW2 defences. They run along the river’s edge and above the shingle beach and some are very rusty and jagged and quite likely to open your leg if you are not careful. My location was faced by a shingle bank, a strip of shingle and then a sandy beach with the remains of a groyne which is now just few wooden posts sticking up and forming a line going down what would have been the beach had it not been hight tide or so I thought.
I set up my tripod and camera, selected my filters and calculated the shutter speed; thirty seconds, and then grabbed my equipment as a largish wave washed over where I was standing. I repositioned myself and left a little beach between me and advancing tide and took the next image.
Bawdsey Quay Beach Below Bawdsey Manor
I chose to leave this as though it was underexposed but this was what I saw though the camera viewfinder. It is sunrise photo because it was taken at sunrise but there was no chance that I or my camera was going to see her.
I went back a couple of weeks later and repeated the exercise but stationed myself a little further towards the river estuary. Better luck but not that much. This time, and it seems to haunt me at the moment, there was cloud over the horizon and I was not going to see the sun. If you look at the picture below PhotoPills, the app for all things photographic and which has a virtual reality viewer, puts the sun to the right of the bright part of the sky. Another sunrise photo without the sun or blue sky.
Bawdsey Beach Some Blue Sky
My next visit was to Aldeburgh just after the end of British Summer Time and I thought that I would take my next photo at the shell statue. Despite its popularity, and from a photographic perspective very low hanging fruit, there was not many people about so I set my camera and tripod back from the shell and above the carpark. There was one other lady with her phone ready to take a photo but from the car park. I checked my settings which I would do over and over again whilst waiting for the sun. A few minutes before sunrise the carpark started to fill up and a crowd of people got out with dogs and children to walk to the sculpture. It was going to be a lovely dawn I thought, but I was going to need to spend a lot of time in Photoshop cloning out the people. walking. Fortunately they all passed the shell and went down the shingle slope and I took my photo person free or so I thought. When I zoomed in, below the main body of the shell were four legs with the bodies covered by the shell itself. A little post processing, they were gone. Apart from increasing exposure in Lightroom and adding the sunrays in Luminar Neo I did very little to this to get this image.
Aldeburgh
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