Dawn Shoot

After several photo shoots in urban settings at a time of day when the light was rather harsh, I managed to persuade the local camera group that we should get up early and take some landscape shots around dawn, near the town of Alcala de los Gazules, on the edge of a national park.

Now dawn here in Southern Spain at this time of year is at a much more civilised time than in the UK, probably more than 2 hours earlier, at just after 7am. Even so, it proven almost impossible to get fellow club members to come along - only three of us made it in the end - but it was a very worthwhile exercise.

We got to our chosen location about 7am, probably about 15 minutes later than ideal, but were able to take some nice shots of the sunrise. The light certainly is much more interesting at that time of day and, on reviewing the photographs later, it reinforced what you read in books and magazines about how the human eye and the camera see the effects of light differently.

The above photo was taken with my wide-angle lens, just before the sun popped over the brow of the hill. An ND grad filter would have been a useful addition but, as I haven't got one yet, I had to make do without.

All the shots I took over the next 45 minutes, mainly with my telephoto lens, were using the Manual camera setting and a hand-held light meter. I decided to use exposure bracketing and this proved a sensible precaution. Unfortunately, many of my shots exhibited some 'flare', despite using a lens hood, and I presume that this was due to pointing the lens too close to the direction of the sun-rise.

The absence of some early morning clouds made this a less than perfect day for dawn shots, we made the best of it and tried to avoid large expanses of sky although here, with this 'portrait'

shot, I was quite happy to include some.


We then drove into Alcala and rewarded ourselves with the Andalucian breakfast, coffee with pan con tomate (toasted bread roll, olive oil, tomato and a pinch of salt) for me and pan con jamón (with ham instead of the tomato) for Les and Gill. After smugly congratulating ourselves on our early start, we explored the narrow streets of the town and walked to the church, taking photographs as we went.

All in all, it was a morning well spent and I felt that I thoroughly deserved my afternoon siesta.

Other photographs can be seen on my Flickr page (account name 'Citysnapper').