This morning was a strange sunrise shoot. Checking the weather maps
last night I saw there was a potential for an interesting sunrise. Cloud
elevations indicated a better than 50/50 chance of some color as the
sun approached the horizon.

With coffee in hand, I headed out the door with the intention of
photographing this event at Manning Lake.

But, as I drove north along Crystal Lake I could see color starting to
appear in the east. So I changed my plans at stopped at Nat’s Bridge
on the north end of Crystal Lake.

The color was growing fast.

and there were nice reflections on the surface of the water. I scurried
around looking for a composition and settled on one looking down a
short path to the water, nicely framed with a bush on either side. With
the camera level and exposure set, I walked back up to my car to get my coffee.

Walking back I noticed some nice clouds behind the large pines that overhang the lake about two hundred yards down water. “They would be nice to include in the shot,” I thought to myself. Moving the camera farther to the left might do it; it didn’t.

I had to quickly find a new composition.

I settled in about ten feet farther down the shore and set up the composition and exposure. The color was getting quite interesting and I was hopeful for a nice red sunrise. There were no low-level clouds and quite a few mid-level clouds that were catching the magenta tones of the sunrise. In this location I knew I would have to “focus stack” the image in order to get the foreground, mid-ground trees and the far shoreline all in sharp focus. I took a set of shots and then noticed the color was moving south - - literally. My scene was turning to blues and grays and farther south, considerably farther south than where the sun was going to come up, the horizon was magenta.

I need to find a new composition.

I climbed back up the bank to the roadway and found being up a bit higher helped. I raised my tripod and leveled it off, found my composition, set my exposure and again, having to focus stack determined my focus spots. I took a set of shots and as I did, I heard a loud commotion coming from behind me. Apparently, my popping up on the roadway had startled some Canadian Geese that had overnighted in the cove behind me and were now flapping furiously in an attempt to take off in my direction. As they neared my location I thought “That could add an interesting element to the sunrise shot.”

Their flight path was going to bring them directly over my position. But my shutter speed is too low. Quickly, I increased my sensor's sensitivity to light by raising the ISO from 100 to 800. A quick adjustment to the exposure settings and realized the speed was still too low. I jacked it up to 1200 and that gave me an adequate shutter speed to capture the geese as they entered the frame. As I clicked the shutter I realized they were flying below the tree line and would be barely visible in the shadow, if visible at all. It was still relatively dark below the horizon.

When I turned to see if there were more geese in the cove, I was distracted by the full Hunter moon setting in the west. Approaching clouds were stretching fingers of blue across its face and there was a perfect reflection in the water. The moon was catching morning sunlight and glowing. I quickly set my camera up across the road, turned the camera to a vertical orientation, framed up my shot and visually adjusted the focus and exposure to get what was essentially a “blue hour” shot in this sheltered cove.

Try as I did, I could not find the moon in my frame. Looking up, I realized the clouds had overtaken it in the 30-40 seconds it had taken me to move and set up the camera.

Just then, another flock of geese started calling out from the darkened cove. Like the fool I was proving myself to be, I set the camera back to its horizontal, landscape position, picked up the camera and tripod as one and rushed back across the road to re-establish the earlier shot.

Thankfully, the geese were loud but slow to gather and take flight. With everything set up, I took my initial focus stacked exposures, turned to check out the situation with the geese and noticed there were going to be two waves of geese. The first “v” consisted of about twenty-five birds, the second about ten flying a few seconds behind. They were all lined up to fly almost overhead. I jacked up my sensor sensitivity again to gain an acceptable shutter speed to prevent blurring of the birds and got ready to hit the shutter as they entered the scene. Finally, it was all coming together.

I would get the shot I had hoped for with a flock of geese flying into the sunrise. Wait, is that a beaver swimming about thirty feet offshore?

Damn! Refocus on the beaver and the v-pattern in his wake, squeeze off a series of bracketed shots, refocus for the geese . . . . where are the birds?

Almost directly overhead - - good!

I am ready. The shutter starts clicking in rapid-fire mode as I am continuously focusing on the geese fly-by.

It was at this time I noticed all the magenta colors in the sky were gone. What had been beautiful shades of magenta had now somehow without my noticing, turned to a nice, warm amber color.