Sunrises and Sunsets

Beautiful warm 80's today, keep out of the breeze though. Windy gusts, hold onto your hair.
Clouded up late afternoon but still high 60's at 12:00 PM.
 

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I captured the above, downsized for web image, last Saturday at dawn at 5:47am PDT, July 26, 2025. My Sony a6700 was set to ISO 400, exposure compensation at -0.7, with my Sigma DC DN 30mm lens at F5.6. In Aperture priority mode, the camera set its shutter speed to 1/400 second or enough to limit blur. The full image size is 6200 by 4100 pixels and is a 3 frame focus stack blend.

Despite being a serious photographer for 4+ decades, I don't have many dawn or sunrise images in my body of work, but do bother to set up for such images when I am at workable lake reflection or tree silhouette locations and weather cooperates. Unlike most serious photographers, I prefer my work to be reasonable renderings of what I experienced and not the result of jacked up camera software saturation or hue twisting or post processing.

This was in the Hoover Wilderness about the western shore of Green Lake at 8.9k feet in the Hoover Wilderness while on a 6-day backpacking trip with 2 others. This is on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada mountain range where air is generally drier and more clear. The recent day's weather had light thunderstorms that often provides necessary early day clouds to make better images possible.

In most good mountain locations, it is dawn and not actual sunrise when early sky colors are best. "Civil Twilight" is the term before the yet to appear sun is at no more than 6 degrees below the horizon. On that date at that latitude, astronomical sunrise is at 5:59am PDT at 65 degrees south of due north that is also 25 degrees north of due east, I was able to understand that by viewing a topographic map. A good web source for astronomical data at given locations can be found at:

Sunrise and sunset times in Bridgeport

In order to possibly capture good dawn skies in lake waters, a view eastward needs to be relatively unblocked by terrain or trees with breezes reasonably calm. In this case, the actual sunrise was a bit right of the image sky low point on the silhouetted distant canyon slopes. Our human eyes can actually see dim features, where a camera with exposure set for the sky renders pure black due to lack of adequate dynamic sensor range. One may post process blend bracketed exposures, but better results require difficult work. Far, far more people shoot sunsets/dusk skies because it is psychologically hard while sleepy and in a warm comfortable sleeping bag, to get up in dim dawn chilly temps.

I woke about 5:10am to a moderately chilly temperature, put on clothing within my one person tent, grabbed my photo gear daypack and headlamp, walked a couple hundred yards to this lake shore location, set up my camera and tripod then began shooting at 5:18am PDT or a full half hour earlier than when I captured the above. There possibly could have been earlier, dimmer earth shadow color if the sun had not been blocked by distant clouds. Note the light blue sky color areas that only occur closer to sunrise. When fiery sky colors peaked, I took a few sets of shots. At one point, a raven flew by just above the water that created a more interesting photo with its reflection.
 

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