Early morning at Stanley Park

I had an early morning outing to Stanley Park with my mum a few week ago that went fairly well so I decided to give it another go. Getting up early, especially when it's -3 out, is hard but the crystal clear weather we've been getting simply cannot be ignored.

Last week's trip was mainly a learning exercise, this week I wanted to approach this more artistically. Having recently done some reading on big, wide angle shots I decided to try my hand at it with an evening trip to Lighthouse Park and an early morning outing to Stanley Park. My first attempts were not too bad but I came away from the exercises feeling that I was focusing too much on the technical aspects and not enough on the artistic side of things. This week I wanted to get more into the artistic groove.

Sunrise today was at 6:18 so I got up at 5 in the hopes that I'd catch some of the soft, pre-dawn light. By the time I arrived, parked and had all my gear ready it was almost 6. This left only a few minutes to shoot before the nice really soft light was gone. I really should aim to be at location an hour before sun rise in the future as I could see that there were plenty of good opportunities the whole drive in.

I tried to relax and let ideas come to me so I didn't rush into taking all kinds of snapshots hoping that some would work out. I only managed to pull off a few shots before the sun was fully over the horizon. A couple of them turned out ok but they are fairly basic and I think that anyone out there at this time would have got nearly the exact same shots.

In this shot I ended up removing the moon with PhotoShop because it just looked like an annoying fuzzy light (a nice big glowing ball would have been better.



6:11am, D70s, Nikon DX 18-70 @ 24mm, 1 sec, f/25, tripod, shutter release on a 2 second timer

I'm not converting from NEF's properly right now so the on-line image does not contain the EXIF data from the shot.

Once the sun was up I tried some more experimental shots but none of them really worked. I didn't really spend enough time with any of my ideas to work out the problems that would make the shots work (didn't hit that groove that I was after).