I consider sunrise photography to be difficult. I have never had much luck, but maybe I can at least get better. There was a lot to learn this morning (Saturday, Sept 9) at Covehead. – my pictures suffered noise, focus and composition problems. I didn’t realize until reading afterward that morning light is much bluer than evening light and I should have had my white balance set to shade or cloudy rather than “auto”. We didn’t bother to bring mosquito repellent. That was a hugely bad idea for a still morning visit to a salt marsh. I managed to get a couple shots, then retreated to the car. Marcy, who would do anything for a picture, stayed out there (and she is still swollen from bites a day later.)

I dashed out of the car, set up the tripod and fired off a shot. I later realized that my ISO was set to 3200, but by that time we had lost the yellows and oranges, So I had to go with this: The shot has been highly sharpened and denoised. Might look good on a cellphone, but won’t stand up to enlargement. I was using my 18-200 travel lens, It would have been better to use my cheap but sharp 35 mm prime lens.

Fog is a gift for a still morning sunrise. I should have spent less time shooting and more time looking for better composition. Dew drops covered everything. This would have been a great opportunity to focus on them with the reflected light. 

A bit of violation of the rule of thirds: not sure what I could have done here, but generally I would want something to draw the eye toward, then a following line to the rest of the elements in the photo. I just didn’t have time to think because these cormorants startled, then flew away.

This was just too long of a reach and too little light to get a great, sharp picture with my 18-200 – This is max zoom on my 18-200 which is soft anyway and then I crop-zoomed in Lightroom. Marcy did much better with her 150-600 Tamron. I went for reducing the yellow luminance on the flowers and tried sharpening the best I could.

Very high dynamic range here. I post-processed in Lightroom with variable filters top-to-bottom and then bottom to top. The salt marsh grass was covered in dew. I should have concentrated on getting the foreground reflections.