Cronulla Dawn

After photographing the sunrise at the Mahon Pool at Maroubra last week we did a follow up dawn shoot down at Cronulla last Thursday.

Having been to Cronulla before and given the earlier experience at Maroubra I had a better idea of what might be achieved this time.  It was certainly a different result as the tide and sunrise were not as well aligned.

As the sky began to brighten I arrived and set up, at first concentrating on the water in a similar way to the week before.  But once the sun rose up behind the low cloud bank I reframed the scene to capture the unexpected beauty emerging in the sky.

From the sun first rising until the colours faded was only twelve minutes.

The colours in the sky were enthralling and the rays of the sun were spectacular.  The other photographer was a bonus.

Canon 7D, 17mm focal length, 1/20sec @ f/11, ISO 100, 3x ND Grad filters.

Cropped out foreground to create a scenic panorama

Normally I shoot in RAW format and so was able to import this single file into Oloneo PhotoEngine and give it some HDR treatment as even with the ND filters I didn't have enough dynamic range in the initial image to do justice to the sun's rays and felt the photo needs to have some detail in the foreground to balance the colour in the sky.

Oloneo PhotoEngine is a new HDR program which is still in Beta mode and available as a free download from the Oloneo website ( http://www.oloneo.com/ ) until the end of May.