Description

Dead Horse Bay , Brooklyn, NSW

Every now and then I go to work a bit later (I am known to be ‘first-in’ the office usually) and treat myself to a weekday dawn shoot. Brooklyn seems to be appealing to me a lot recently. I arrived just as the Blue Hour was ending and the first light lit the sky. There were less clouds than the forecast suggested but some nice early pink light kept me busy early on. Sunrise is always a ‘muted light and colour’ then ‘brighter colours’ then a short wait with a lot of light but zero colour. Then…… ta-dah!…  ‘here comes the sun’. As is always the case with a Brooklyn sunrise, the sun appears a lot later over the hills than the advertised sunrise time. So it leaves a lot of ‘standing around’ time just waiting for the sun to reach the crest of the hill.

On this day, my luck was well and truly in… the earlier lack of cloud was but a distant memory as a beautiful bank of cloud formed in the shape of a hand with many fingers. I had the benefit of a very low tide to allow me to stand back and use the rocks for foreground depth. For a brief moment as the sun breached the hill, the light blazed above, and the world was full of the lovely first orange glow.

I used F22 to enable the sun to ‘burst’ and create a point of interest around the sun. It’s not recommended to shoot at F22 despite getting such a great depth of field. The simple reason? Lenses just don’t work so well at F22 or F16 as they do at F11 or F8. Not as crisp and clear. So I did something different that morning and broke my routine. And I arrived at work fresher than usual, and ready to greet the daily challenges. When was the last time you did something different first thing in the morning?

EDIT 2026 – Ok I know this setting isn’t Dead Horse Bay… but it disappeared off my site for no known reason sometime between 2019 and 2026. I have now re-added it and left it as the original name. My geography has improved since then!