There’s nothing quite like a day in the field with your cameras. The best days begin with the rising sun and end when it sets.

The detail rich sunrise/sunset photos that you often see today are getting common place, but they are usually beautiful.  Those bright and beautiful clouds combined with non-silhouetted foregrounds, have added a new dimension to sunrise photography.  HDR photography has been a game changer and we are all richer for it.  Just the same when something’s gained, often something is also lost.

When I began switching to nature as my specialty, much of my first success came from sunrises/sunsets.  It is a great subject for inroads into new markets.  Most were calendars and some were covers and foldouts in magazines.  When birds became my top subject, covers and foldouts were very slow to arrive.

Sunrise/sunset photography can many a lot of different things, depending on your location and your treatment.

In the first image below, I capture reflections of sunrise clouds in a Lake Michigan tidal pool. The next is Wilson’s Arch in Utah.  I stopped at this roadside arch in 1992 on my way out of Canyonlands N. P.  The arch is not as beautiful as most, but the moment that the rising sun illuminating the center of it, beautify ensued

Direct sunrises that have defined shapes to silhouette, are an art that seems to be dying.  Silhouettes and reflections will always be my favorites.  I look for crisp shapes that complete the picture.  I was never above using manmade objects to complete my image.

Let’s look at the sunrise/sunset art of five great photographers.

I love this Ruth Hoyt sunrise of the Arizona Desert.  She keeps the tradition alive of silhouetting recognizable objects.  This image is well thought out and of course the sunstar really sets it off.

Guy Tal is one of the best known landscape artists in America.  This amazing image is composed by a photographer that is comfortable enough with his work to try unique compositions.  Very few Guy Tal images suffer from a “color overload” which tells me this color is natural. In my own experience, this color is normal when you have a storm cloud being illuminated by the rising sun. Love it!

Kevin McNeal has graced these pages before, and for good reason.  This lighter, gentler sunrise is beautiful. To me it appears like there was a graduated neutral density filter employed here rather than HDR editing.  Either way I really like the mood.

This pano was made by Lewis Kemper and it also has that lighter gentler feeling to it. It works great in this format.  It appears to be a crop rather than a panoramic stitch accomplished in the editing process

Ron Bigelow is a photographer who shoots a lot of sunrise/sunsets.  His photos were small so I decided to include two of them. He also writes a photo blog and sunrise/sunset is one of his subjects.

If you’d like to visit the mind of a great photographer, and understand how one migrates from the world of being a wedding photographer to a nature photographer, read the  Charles Glatzer interview——Life Focus  The images alone are worth the visit.

I have no words of wisdom or profound statements to leave you with today.  I know what your thinking……sheesh, he finally ran out of words.

Have a great day,                                                                                                                            Wayne