A Tale of Two Mornings
Landscape photography is all about persistence. Photographing even the exact same location one day apart can yield very different results as this post will explain. I’d been wanting to head down to Albert Park Lake and photograph the city’s reflections early in the morning at dawn. It’s a classic view of the city and in the right light can look quite nice. For these images I headed down to the lake and setup at the same spot on both the 17th and 18th of June. I knew on the 17th that unfortunately there was likely to be a high percentage of cloud cover. Either way I committed to checking it out. I crawled out of bed and made it down to the lake as the Melbourne weather observation at 6am was showing an almost perfectly calm 0km/h wind reading with no gusts, so I knew the reflections were going to be really nice.
The reflections were great! Unfortunately as it neared sunrise it was obvious that the cloud cover was almost 100% and it was unlikely any nice colour in the sky from the sunrise to my right was going to eventuate. This image above was captured at 7:23am and the sunrise was at 7:34am. One of my favourite times to shoot the city is just before the sun rises. At this time you’re still getting the building city lights and colour in the sky, a nice balance between the two elements.
This image was captured at 7:37am, around 3 minutes after sunrise. Unfortunately as predicted there was no nice colour in the sky. The image would probably work better as a black and white in this instance as there’s very little colour.
After not achieving the desired result on the 17th of June the forecast for the next morning was looking really good. Mostly sunny, chance of fog and again very calm wind speed, a must for nice city reflections. I headed back to the lake at the same spot almost exactly 24 hours later to try the same shot again. In terms of cloud cover it was almost a polar opposite of the prior morning. Clear, but with a nice small bank of clouds above the Melbourne CBD that reflected in the lake below.
Sunrise on the 18th was much more beautiful. A nice small bank of clouds and almost perfectly calm again.
Things were looking much better this morning. The sun rising to the east was nicely side lighting the Melbourne skyscrapers and the small bank of clouds lined up neatly above and below the city. The above frame I captured at 7:23am, 11 minutes before sunrise at 7:34am. When processing in Adobe Lightroom I applied some basic enhancing of colours, some lens corrections and a slight tweak in white balance to help bring out the dawn blues and purples. As the sun was rising from the right of frame I also used a couple of graduated filters in Lightroom to balance the exposure. One on the right hand side to pull back the highlights and one on the left of the frame to bring up the exposure of the left hand side ever so slightly. This was in conjunction with the filters I had on the camera during the shoot. For this I used a .6 (2 stop) hard edge graduated filter over the sky as well as a Little Stopper neutral density filter to achieve a 30 second exposure time. The exposure time added a nice dreamlike feel to the image. The sunnier conditions on this morning also allowed me to capture the light bursting through onto this stunning Morton Bay Fig Tree as I made my way back to the car.
In summary, don’t feel down about missing that shot you had envisioned in your head. Pack up your gear and back again the next day if you can, you might just get that shot you were looking for. Thanks for reading!