Sunrise on Sunday

conorgriff

Hey guys, my first attempt at photographing a sunrise with my new camera. I know the image is a little noisy and not quite as sharp as I'd like but it was hand held. From the point of view of composition what do ya think?

Shrimp

Thats a good first shot, I'll give you that much. I like how you can see the sugarloaf in the middle. Was this taken with a wide-angle lens? Looks like it was due to the slight distortion. I think with a bit of post work it could beimproved a bit.

maybe..

conorgriff

Yeah it was taken with the kit lens set on 18mm, I kinda liked the distortion effect so I deliberately put the horizon off centre but maybe that's a bad thing. The pic has most of the sky cropped out because most of the interesting patterns and colours were in the lower portion of the sky. What post processing would you recommend? I shot it in raw + jpeg so that was the jpeg version.

Did you bump up the saturation a bit on your version?

Rantorama

Looks fantastic...love all the different hues of blue.

Shrimp

I made more contrast, and when over it with the burn tool. Basically just more contrast, oh and i sharpened it too.

conorgriff

Yeah it made the reflections on the water a bit warmer alright although I had already sharpened it slightly with smart sharpen. I think the one you did looks a little blocky now in the lower left but then again I sharpened the full size image and you were stuck with the little one so that's to be expected. Cheers for the feedback tho

**Timbuk2**

I thought it was a great first attempt. I don't do much photography now but on my first shot before I took it I thought it was easy and turned out to be a lot harder, and trust me, none of my first shots were as good as this one..

conorgriff

Cheers Tim, well that's not my first shot with the camera but it's my first sunrise with my new cam and I got the camera on wed so still lots and lots to learn, one thing I did learn was that it's difficult to do handheld shots of stuff like this because no matter how hard I tried to hold the camera still I seemed to get some blur.

Hey shrimp, what shutter speed would you have used on something like this? I used 1/3 of a second on Tv mode and at ISO200.

DotOrg

shutter speed general rule is to keep it abobe the focal length of the lens you're using

eg: if you're using a 50mm lens, use at least 1/5oth
if you're using a 200mm lens use at least 1/200th

or use a tripod and you can use several second exposures with no blur

buutthese are general rules, with practice you can shoot at slower speeds. i can shoot at 1/10th and often get very sharp images because of lots of practice in learning the right way to stand and hold my cameras

conorgriff

Thanks DotOrg, I kinda knew about the shutter speed rule but abandoned it in favour of a lower ISO setting, probably should have just put the ISO on 800 and increased the shutter speed but that's inexperience I suppose. I just didn't want to get a load of noise in the picture. Cheers again for the help

Shrimp

A high ISO and Quick shutter speed will result in noise.

Try to avoid high ISO selection when not shooting quick shutter speeds.

So remeber low ISO = Low Noise...

Oriel

Very nice photo. I thought it was several images joined together. Get out there again!

S.

DotOrg

if you ever shot film, the noise at 1600iso in digital is like the noise at 400/800 in film terms

it's far better to get a shot with grain than no shot at all

in fact, read this article from start to finish and you'll never worry about grain again
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/columns/sm-july31-05.shtml

conorgriff

DotOrg wrote:

if you ever shot film, the noise at 1600iso in digital is like the noise at 400/800 in film terms

it's far better to get a shot with grain than no shot at all

in fact, read this article from start to finish and you'll never worry about grain again
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/columns/sm-july31-05.shtml

Thanks mate, will do!

Shrimp

Digital grain is far less desirable than film grain tho..

DotOrg

i used to shoot exclusively with 1600iso colour print film, it was horrible compared to digital, i've some 12x8 prints here from them and compared to my recent digital shots they look really poor

some high iso black and white films can have atmospheric grain but you can do very similar things in photoshop (and it generally involves adding grain as digital images are rarely as noisy as something like ilford delta 3200)