LAKE MICHIGAN SUNRISE

Now that the days are getting shorter, I am starting to have enough time, even after working out in the morning, to get to the lakefront before sunrise.  Friday morning, October 7, promised to be clear, and about 20 minutes before the sun came up I headed to the lakefront at Concordia University.

Although the sky was clear, there was enough humidity in the air to obscure the line of the horizon over the lake.  Nevertheless, the sky was turning an interesting color, so I started taking some shots.  There was a small tree at the edge of the bluff, and I thought for my first shot it would be good to frame the sky with the silhouette of the tree.

It would probably have been better to have positioned the camera to eliminate the vegetation to the right of the tree.

On the other hand, for this next shot I eliminated the tree and focused on the grass and shrubs.  I also decided to crop the shot to eliminate a portion of the sky and to emphasize the horizontal components of the scene.

Here are a couple more shots that incorporated silhouetted shrubs (weeds, actually).

I liked a lot the simplicity of this last shot.

For the next shot I eliminated everything except lake and sky.  I also cropped it to emphasize the linearity of the shot.

A little too simple.  This shot would have had more power had there been a clearer line at the horizon.

Finally, the sun broke the horizon.  Here are a few of the shots as the sun rose (or as the horizon fell away, if you will).

I have not been able to identify the dark object to the lower left of the sun in the shot above.  It did not appear in any other photos.

The above shots were pretty disappointing.

Here is one final shot of the scene down the lakeshore to the south.  I liked this shot quite a lot.

It seems evident that I did a better job with the shots that did not include the sun than with those attempting to capture the actual sunrise.

There were a large number of birds in the sky in the early morning.  I left a few of them in the shots but "eliminated" most of them in post-capture editing.

I also need to work on color balance.  If I had put the camera on auto white balance, it would have been "fighting" the natural color of the scene.  In the end, I felt the color in these shots was pretty close to what I was seeing.

I will definitely plan to do this again.