First sunrise shot

7th Jul 2019

Last Wednesday evening, having viewed the weather forecast for the early hours of Thursday morning, and seeing that it was predicted for the skies to be fairly cloud-free, I decided to take a trip to Baginbun Beach, which is a secluded beach located near Fethard-on-Sea, in County Wexford. This was a location for another YouTube video.

I arrived at the beach at around 4:00 a.m. and it was in the process of brightening up, to the extent that I could walk down to the beach from the car park. It turned out that I had more than enough time to set up my gear for both the still images and the filming, before the sun started coming up at around 5:15 a.m.

The wind was rather calm, which meant that the waves were gentle, also the tide was coming in, and was not far from high tide. When the sun came up, there was minimal cloud diffusion, which made for favourable conditions for the shoot.

As the sky was getting brighter, it was a matter of playing around with some locations for composition; there were two boats anchored a short distance from the shore, and a rock that gets partially submerged at high tide. I started experimenting with different camera settings (aperture, shutter speed, focal length), and use of filters (3-stop full ND, and 2-stop graduated ND), to see which setting works best.

There were a few long exposure images that I found to work best before the sun rose, smoothing out the detail in the water. After the sun came up, I found a shorter exposure, together with the ND grad filter, providing a reflection of the sun light on the water.

Once the sun was well clear of the horizon, I felt that there were no more “sunrise” pictures to be had from the location. It was time to say the closing clip for the video, albeit it took several takes before I got one with which I was reasonably happy.

When I got home, it was time to start the editing, which I completed on Friday evening, and uploaded on Saturday morning. I think this was one of the shortest intervals between successive uploads.

I could do a lot worse than regularise uploading of content onto YouTube.