I’ve been spending some time reading up on how to get a sunrise image to turn out.  Since I’ve never gone somewhere for the purposes of taking a sunrise or a sunset, I decided to try one.

Ok, I couldn’t sleep, and when I woke up I realized it was 5:10 am, and sunrise is around 5:15 am.

I took a bunch of images as I stood there for about 2 hours.  I discovered that my balcony is a horrible place to try to take sunrise pictures due to the trees and hills.  The sun gets into a good position about 90-120 minutes after first light, but which time it is too bright and washes out everything else.

But I did get these two images.

(click for larger version)

I used a tripod so it made it a lot easier to get the same general area in two different pictures.

It may not be very noticeable, but the top image exposes the ground better, but at the cost of over exposing the sky.  The bottom image exposes the sky well, but underexposes the ground.

What to do…

I cheated.  Hurray for PhotoShop.

(click for larger version)

This is a mix of the two versions.  It was done fairly quickly, but I kind of like how it came out.  Even if it does look like something it isn’t.

I took the bottom image and set that as the background, then dropped the top image on top as a different layer.  I then set it to about 75% opacity, then went about erasing the sky from the top image.  The end result is something a bit better than the two source images, but still not quite as good as I was hoping for.

But I feel like I learn more from failure than success.  I learned a bit about how to make a decent sunrise image (location!) and quite a bit about how to not make one.

-sdo