I have become a bit lazy lately and have struggled to get up for any sunrise shoots in a while. So after a few days of mist and sun in the mornings I was determined to get up today. I chose Petersfield Heath for three reasons. Firstly, its not too far from home so I didn't have to get up SUPER early! Secondly, I had hoped for mist over the lake which would have made for some stunning photos. Thirdly, the predicted sunrise quality on MySunset app was very high for Petersfield.
One thing I constantly do on morning shoots is arriving too late and leaving no time in order to set up ready for the shot. While I wasn't early, i had thankfully looked at PlanIt the night before and realised the jetty was pointing in the direction of the sunrise so headed straight for it. I tried out a few different compositions hand held first, and after reviewing the images I decided that the railings on the jetty made for a good leading line and a lot of the other compositions were quite cluttered.
The buggest issue I found was that I wanted to take some long exposures to smooth out the water and have some movement in the clouds. Unfortunately, there were a lot of birds out on the water which meant I ended up with a lot of black streaks across the water as you can see in this image. I do actually quite like the effect, but because the birds are moving all around there is no pattern to it, which makes it distracting in my opinion.
The final image was taken after someone had arrived to feed the birds which meant the majority of them had moved the other side of the jetty out of the shot. Those that were left I ended up photoshopping out to keep the image as clean as possible.