Sunrise Photography Competition / Tutorial

It's been a long time since I have been posting to Steemit. I thought that I would try and keep my photography posts up to date so I decided to do a tutorial on how to take a sunrise photo (and enter a competition at the same time).

Here is the end result:

The photo was taken at Coliemore Harbour in Dalkey, Dublin, Ireland. You can see Dalkey Island in the background beside the sun. It was taken on a Canon 5D mkIV with an Irix 15mm f/2.4.

There is always the problem of exposure when you are taking a sunrise photo, normally the sky/sun is completely blown out and the foreground is completely dark, it's near impossible to balance the two.

The solution is to take bracketed photos. This simply means you take 3 photos of the scene, one dark, one normal exposure and one over exposed shots. The three photos are then blended together to make sure all parts of the photo are correctly exposed. You can do this with either Lightroom or Photoshop.

You need to have your camera set up on a tripod, then set bracketing mode on your camera to take 3 bracketed photos, then it's easy from there. Here are the 3 original images:

Once you have the photos loaded into Lighroom, select them all, then click on Photo > Photo Merge > HDR. This should automatically adjust and blend the 3 exposures giving you something that looks good. Additional adjustments were made then after.

If you like the tutorial, just let me know and I can create some more on various different topics. Thanks!!