This week everyone could vote again, on which photo they would like to see in this vlog. I chose two photos that I haven shown much and shared them in my story on Instagram. The result was clear, the winner was the following photo:

I took this photo over a year ago, during the period before corona. That is how my mind defines things now. Either way, in January 2020 I went out for sunrise with my boyfriend to take photos at a river. The sunrise itself was quite disappointing, but that didn’t stop me from trying new things and getting some good photos.

The sunrise

Sunrise is always a thing for me. I do love being at locations and having these epic light circumstances, but I can’t seem to get myself out of bed. Especially if it is reaaallly early… That is part of the beauty of sunrise in January, it is not really that early that you need to get out of bed. I took this photo around 8:30 in the morning. Which to be honest, is doable even for me.

When we woke up, the sky was half cloudy half not cloudy, but we went out anyway. That is hard, but also the way to go for sunrises. It was definitely worth it in the end.

The photo

For this photo I wanted to get down close to the water so the reflection would take up about half the image. In most of my images I try to either place a subject in the middle of the frame or at one third. This time I used the middle, because that adds some symmetry to the image. I used the leading line of the water edge to draw your eyes to the subject of the photo. Although I will admit that the subject is not entirely clear, but more on that later.

For this photo, I used F/7.1 This is a quite closed down aperture so I would have most of the scene in focus. That also means that not a lot of light can get onto the sensor. Therefore, the ISO compensated. I often used auto ISO with a limit high back then. In this case the ISO was 2500, which resulted in quite some noise in the photo. Luckily it is not really visible if you don’t zoom too much :). The shutterspeed was at 1/125s which is fine for handheld shooting with a 50 mm. The water is frozen still, but still looks soft. This is also the result of the shutterspeed.

What I would have done differently

I already mentioned it, but looking back on this photo now, it misses a clear subject. I think the house can be that, but I would have liked to not hide it behind the tree. Besides the subject, I would have wanted to wait a bit longer, because the colors of the sunrise came a bit later. We were still taking photos at a different location, but I just wanted to say that patience is key when shooting sunrises and sunsets. As is just trying and doing it. Actually going out and shooting.