This past Saturday after waking up to feed the dogs I thought it may be a good morning to shoot the sunrise. I was up in plenty of time to make the drive across the river to York and shoot along the Susquehanna River. I did a quick check online to see how the cloud coverage looked and all sings pointed toward epic. I also looked at The Photographers Ephemeris (highly recommended tool!) to ensure the sun would be rising at a location that would emphasis the location I was headed to. I arrived on location at about 15 minutes before sunrise. The above shot was my first one of the morning and I have many more that I may share at a later date. I spent about a hour playing around with different compositions as the sun broke over the horizon and the beautiful colors began to fade. Luckily the temperatures were very bearable considering the cold temps we had a week or so ago here in South central PA.
The above image really stood out to me from the bunch because of the ice crystals in the foreground in addition to the awesome colors before the sun rose. The wind turbines of Turkey Hill were an added little treat. The shot began as 3 bracketed exposures (1, 5, and 15 seconds) each shot at f/22, ISO 50 and at a focal length of 18mm. I used my wide angle 10-18mm which has some vignetting at 18 so I had to crop the image down some from it’s initial size. I combined the three shots using Nik HDR Efex Pro 2 using a control point on the foreground ice to enhance the structure. I then took the image into Color Efex Pro 2 and slightly adjusted the colors to pop a little more. I then processed the single 5 second exposure in Lightroom before opening it and my HDR image in Photoshop as separate layers. I masked in each of the layers to my liking to produce the above image. I hope you like it!
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Again, as always the above photo can be purchased in various sized prints in addition to all of my publicly shared worked on my photos page.
