Weekend Sunrise

It was a beautiful weekend in this part of the world: clear, sunny, hardly a breath of wind, and cold. On Saturday I went out earlier than usual to get photos as the sun rose. I was not disappointed and was able to capture the sun as it rose over the hills behind my house.

The shape of the hills may look different to those of you who have seen many of the sunrise photos I have sent over the past 5 years. (Yes, I am in my 5th year of sending out Photo of the Day.) That is because I drove about 3 km (2 miles) down the road to take the photo. These photos were taken at 7:33 am.

There is another reason why I sent these two images out of the 35 photos that I took. They are similar photos but show different compositions. For the first image I used the rule of thirds to position the hills (1/3 of the image is black - the silhouette of the hills), but for the second I used a wider shot and recomposed so the hills took up a very small portion of the image. This allows the viewer to see more of the beautiful colours created by the rising sun reflecting off the clouds.

To attempt to get the best colours as the sun rose, I set my ISO at 100, focused on the brightest clouds, and let the camera do the rest. The technical information was recorded by my camera: 1/750 second (shutter speed) and f 9.5 (aperture).