On Saturday January 15th 2022, eleven members of Visions Photography Club set out for Stonehaven to photograph the sunrise over Dunnottar Castle.
We got there early, or so we thought! It turns out the many other local photographers had the same idea and every hillock and vantage point sported a shivering photographer complete with tripod and flask of coffee!!
Nevertheless we all found spots from which to do battle with our cameras, fumbling in the cold and half light to ensure the settings were correct to get that prize winning shot.
(Please click on the photo galleries to view the photos at full size.)
Some went low, some went high
and some ventured further back to get a slightly different shot.
Eileen even brought along her lens ball for some refraction shots.
The birds were amazing silhouetted againdst the sky ….
Photographing at sunrise is difficult as the foreground is dark and the sky soon gets very bright. One way around this is to bracket your shots. Many cameras will let you set things up at the flick of a switch to automatically take 3 or more shots at varying exposures. These are then combined in an application such as Lightroom or Affinity to use the best parts of each shot to create an HDR (High Dynamic Range) image.
The sun rising above the horizon was an ideal opportunity to capture starburst, shots that require a very small aperture such as F11 and smaller.
Susan tried some different editing techniques to achieve some pleasing results
We had to overcome a few difficulties such as cameras not playing ball but we all had a wonderful hour or so down at Dunnottar. We all agreed though that the best part of the outing was the coffee and croissants afterwards at The Old Pier Coffee House in Stonehaven where we caught up with our friends and put the ‘photography’ world to rights!
Visions Photography Club 
excellent
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