A 4:30 alarm, lots of coffee and a rather lovely sunrise.

I spend my life moaning about how little sleep I get and how tired I am, but then set a 4:30 alarm during my holidays! I checked the forecast just before bed last night and noted it was meant to be a clear and calm morning, half way between low and high tide. A little more organised this time, I checked the camera had a memory card, grabbed the tripod, remote shutter release and questioned my stupidity. I almost ignored the alarm but pleased I didn't.

Sunrise was due at 5:36 this morning so I set off around 04:50. I wanted to take advantage of the low light to try get some long exposures using the tripod and remove release. I mentioned previously you can achieve a lovely milky effect on the water. This gets a bit more difficult as the sun rises as the photos are likely to be overexposed.

First off though, Just a quick snap as the sky was looking rather lovely.

I whacked the camera on my tripod which is now showing it's age, and set for some exposure times of around a second. You can see the effect I was after on the next three photos. The longer the exposure, the more "milky' the water will become.

Logic would tell me this next one was taken shortly after 05:36, just as the sun was breaking the horizon.

And this one a few minutes after 😀

It became a bit more challenging to be creative as the light was increasing so I tried a 75-300mm lens which doesn't have such a wider aperture. That is it doesn't let as much light into the lens so I could push the exposure time a little.

...and then speed the shutter up a little to try capture some skyward globs of water.

Once again taken with a Canon EOS 6D and mostly with a 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. Processed in Adobe Lightroom.

One thing that has become evident is I've either got a really messy sensor in the camera, or there's lots of dust build up within my lenses. Try to imagine you can't see all the specks of dust that I've not managed to remove! I'll have to give everything a jolly good clean later on to see whether that improves things.