This weekend my friend Tony was visiting from Brisbane so I did something I rarely do which is go out to shoot sunrise. Sadly a lot of the trains were down and buses don’t start until late so that made it hard to decide where to shoot, but we managed to make our way to Berry’s Bay lookout which is just north of the Sydney CBD.

I had previously shot here but it was sunset and the lighting was very flat due to a heavily overcast day. The weather was meant to be overcast on this day too but the thing with sunrise is you never really know what you’ll get so it’s a real gamble. We got there just after 5am and we could already see some light starting to show in the sky so we quickly setup and my first images was the one you see at the top of the page.

It was a long exposure with the sky being 220 seconds and the buildings being 60 seconds then merged in Photoshop. I kept taking shots to see what I could get, once it got a bit brighter I ended up getting the second image you see (just above this text) which was a 20 second exposure only. Both images were taken with the Sony Alpha a7C II and Sony FE 16-35mm f/4 G PZ and a combo of mostly 3, 6 stop ND filters and then none.

With daylight savings about to start, I feel sunset is no longer feasible, but I may give sunrise a shot during the warmer months and see how I go again.