This was one of the better sunrises I’ve had the pleasure to take pictures of. Fortunately I was at the Algoma, WI marina to take pictures of it which offers a lot of nice opportunities to shoot. Unlike most of my other photography excursions, this one I met another person by the name of Zachary Jolly to shoot it with. I had met him a couple weeks before this at Fonferek Falls. You can check out his work on Instagram.

Location

When I had gone to bed, Sunsetwx wasn’t predicting much of a sunrise, but it wasn’t bad, so I let Zachary know that I’d meet him in the morning. When I woke up, the forecast was a lot better which is what you see below –

We don’t usually get the dark orange or red colors predicted for Wisconsin so when I saw this I was pretty excited. Strangely, when I left my house it was 100% clear outside. On my drive it started to cloud up a lot to the point where it was almost 100% clouded over except for this area towards where Algoma was. It’s weird how much the weather can change between night and sunrise. The thing that sucks about sunrises is you can’t really see what’s going on that well so you just have to take a chance.

As I got closer and closer to Algoma I could see the conditions were getting better and better. Zachary arrived 30 minutes before me which is when I probably should have arrived since when I got there, I was seeing quite a bit of color in the clouds already.

As we walked out on to the pier and setup, I ended up dropping my expensive Formatt-Hitech ND filter on the ground, doh! I ended up using my lower density waterfall filter and my polarizer to slow down the exposure more which wasn’t ideal but worked. Towards the end of the shoot, my tripod leg fell off as well. After all of that happened, I just gave up shooting with my camera and switched over to flying the drone.

While flying the drone, I noticed another Phantom 4 in the air, but I couldn’t tell where the operator was flying it from. When I got home I posted in the Green Bay Drone Facebook group and discovered that it was local business owner Chris Knight. He did a live stream of his flight on Facebook which you can watch as well.

Check out Zachary’s Vlog video of the trip as well which I make a cameo in –

Composition

A few weeks before this, I had visited Algoma and ended getting a total overcast sunrise, i.e. no sunrise. I was disappointed, but used the visit to scout out some new compositions and try new things out. Here’s an example of a shot I got while on this trip – https://500px.com/photo/211224507/leading-lines-by-neal-grosskopf

Since I had this trip under by belt, I could use some of the same compositions from it for this sunrise which was going to be a lot better. If I hadn’t done this trip, I might have just shot from the normal spots I go to in the marina so sometimes it pays to go out during lousy days.

The Algoma marina offers a ton of great leading lines which you can use to your advantage depending on where the best color in the sky is. I really like how the pier leads you to the lighthouse and the catwalk also leads you through the scene. Overall I think it’s one of my better pictures so hopefully others enjoy it as well.

The tricky thing with shooting with another person is you have to try to stay out of their frame. This was one thing I had to consider while shooting. Zachary had a kit lens so he couldn’t go as wide as me so I usually stayed close to the ground while he stood up. I really only took two different compositions the whole time, one like you see in this picture and another down by the rocks. I wasn’t sure when the colors were going to peak so I didn’t want to move around too much.

Post Processing

I was struggling to come up with something for the picture as I had seen Zachary’s shot first. At first I just created an image that was a direct copy of his just for fun. I sat on the photo for a couple weeks until I upgraded my copy of Raya Pro to version 2.0. I thought I’d use this image as a test for the software and after I had finished blending it in Photoshop, I just kept going in Lightroom until you see what I have here.

As far as overall processing went, I wanted to push the saturation more than I usually do. I feel like I can be a bit conservative with that whereas a lot of the pro landscape guys are not. I also spent a fair amount of time trying to correct the wide angle distortion that caused the lighthouse to sort of lean.

Thanks for reading, this was a really exciting outing and one that I will never forget!

Software Used

Lightroom

Photoshop

Techniques Used

Exposure Stacking

High-Dynamic-Range

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