One of my favourite things to capture is a good sunrise or sunset whether it is a colourful sky, a hazy golden hour, a mirage, a red sun etc. A colourful sky is the most variable out of these and can range from something very minimal with the slightest bit of cloud illuminated amongst a dark gloomy sky to something very epic and surreal with distinct, vivid cloud shapes and all kinds of bright colours to be seen. I’ve seen my share of both ends of the spectrum and everything in between with a tendency to miss some special ones a lot of the time because I underestimate nature and judge the cloud patterns wrong or everything changes too quickly to anticipate like a rainy sunset for instance which could be inclement and wet or a very golden sky with bright rainbows.
In Ireland, the patterns I look out for in predicting a good sunrise or sunset is cloud type, the wind direction and weather fronts.
a) Cloud type is extremely important as the higher, the better so the sun isn’t obstructed when it gets to a low horizon. The most well-known cloud type that is good for illuminating the sky in colour is altocumulus.
b) The wind direction can also be pretty telling as it may influence the cloud types being featured or of course the weather itself. If it’s a southeasterly, it will tend to be hazy with air pollutants being imported from the continent and whilst that can result in a red or pink sun, it also leads to less muted colours as compared to popular belief. If it’s a southwesterly wind, a lot of cloud tends to feature due to the mild and humid nature but if you manage breaks in the cloud, there can be some very colourful skies indeed as the cloud altitude tends to be quite high. If it’s a northerly wind, there doesn’t tend to be much cloud, unless it’s a unstable flow with a lot of showers, which doesn’t give much window for colourful skies to occur. Of course, none of these are set as definite. They are just trends I have noticed with the weather of observing the sky over the years in my local area.
c) The timing of weather fronts is key. This is especially the case for sunrises. Warm fronts approaching from the Atlantic Ocean can result in red skies at dawn, particularly in the east of Ireland where it tends to be clearer. This is due to warm fronts bringing in high cloud which goes back to cloud type being a huge player.
With that painfully long introduction out of the way, let’s get onto the main reason you’re here and that is me talking about my experience of the sunrise on Sunday April 10th 2022 at Malahide Beach.
After a cold and relatively clear night in Dublin, high cloud approached from the southwest on Sunday morning. At home, I was contemplating whether to go out or not. It looked very cloudy with not much hope. However, I decided to go to the beach feeling positive about the morning. The tide forecast was favourable for a composition I had wanted to do for a while – a long exposure of the groynes on Malahide Beach which would require the tide to be in and whilst a colourful sky wasn’t necessary, it would be a nice added bonus. When I got to the beach, it was pretty gloomy to the west but over the sea there were clear breaks on the horizon. There was a slight bit of red to be seen on some of the clouds. It was clear to me that the sky over the sea would be good enough for illumination but how widespread would the colours be? Was it going to be quite a distant colourful sky where I would have to use a telephoto lens instead of a wide angle to get the colours in frame?
As it got closer to sunrise, the sky turned more and more colourful and it was better than I could have imagined. I set up a time lapse on my iPhone 11 Pro on a tripod just before the sky exploded into colour and set up my Nikon D5300 camera on another tripod with a 3-stop Hoya neutral density (ND) filter attached onto the standard 18-55mm kit lens. My focal length was the widest 18mm to get much of the landscape in frame as I could. My settings were always ISO-100 as there was no need to increase the ISO from its lowest and increase digital noise, aperture of f/11 to get a wide depth of field but also sharp result whilst the shutter speed was variable as the light kept changing of course. Initially, the ND allowed me to use shutter speed of 13 seconds before the image would be overexposed but once the sun was on the horizon, I could go as slow as 8 seconds. To make sure I get a non-blurry image from camera shake, I used the built-in self timer and allowed it to take 9 shots each time. Why I took 9 shots is, I wanted to get a decently long exposure to smooth out the water but I had only a 3-stop filter. I would be able to achieve this by taking multiple exposures and stacking them together in post production to get an equivalent long exposure if I were to use an appropriate filter.
After I captured the images and looked on the back of the camera, I knew I had experienced a special moment. For ages now, I have always wondered why do my landscape or seascape photographs seem so “amateur” with dark shadows and a rubbish HDR-y look that is difficult to explain. I had purchased this ND filter in December 2021 but it wasn’t my first yet it was by far the best I’ve used as evident by my image quality. I didn’t get to use it much through the winter. I was finally able to say that I have taken a seascape photograph I could confidently say was comparable to those taken by well-known landscape photographers with everything sharp and good exposure.
I was delighted with the result as you can imagine as everything went according to plan. You cannot always guarantee that will happen and in fact, there’s almost always something that will go wrong in your plans (unless you have some witchery planning skills or inside knowledge with mother nature!). It was my first time attempting the composition too which makes it feel even better as it means I will not have to spend my time chasing after it again and have my time dedicated to other photograph ideas instead.
This was when the sky was at its brightest and most widespread red. A sun pillar was visible too. I had to turn down the saturation in post production but arguably it’s still heavily saturated! That’s just how bright and vibrant it was. This is a 45 second exposure from a stack of 5×8 sec exposures to smooth out the water.
A few other images from the session.
There was also a nice mirage that I wasn’t able to capture with my DSLR because I was so focused on long exposures. This was a quick capture of it on the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra 10x zoom as it was disappearing.
Thank you for reading my blog and visiting my site. I hope you enjoy it here!
Sryan Bruen