How I photograph sunrises and sunsets on Lake Superior

Every now and then someone will express the desire of tagging along with me for a full day to see what I see. Unless on a workshop when I’m in the field the entire day or when I’m on a trip and in the field the entire day, I’d hate to say it but my days are fairly boring. Most of the time is spent in front of a computer.

But…

This winter I’ve been trying to shoot sunrise every morning. With the sunrises getting earlier in the morning it’s starting to get harder — I’m not a morning person. That said, I’m going to walk you through a typical sunrise session. Hopefully, this will allow you to see my approach.

Before we do that, here’s my shameless self promo: I opened up my Online Lightroom Class; I had a cancellation on my Bluff Country of the Mississippi River in Iowa Photography Workshop; and I released my Favorite Photos From 2022 eBook.

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Morning Rituals

My days, like most other people’s, starts with my alarm going off and hitting snooze. After I determine that I better get up to achieve my daily goal of shooting sunrise, I roll out of bed, brush my teeth and make coffee. I try to get to my car within a half hour of getting up. That means that I always have my gear ready to go.

Because I live near Lake Superior, I’ll look at the clouds I see in the sky or on NOAA’s radar. My goal is to get out of the house with enough time to drive to a location that puts me under clouds that look like they’ll light up. I’ll want an opening on the eastern horizon and clouds with interesting structure overhead. I usually give myself up to 30 minutes of drive time unless I’m planning to go further. If it’s the latter, then I’ll get up a little earlier. Or I’ll drive the night before and sleep in my car.

I want to be on location 45 minutes before the sunrise time. It doesn’t always happen, but that’s the goal. One hour to 45 minutes gives me enough time to find a foreground that works with the clouds. It also gives me enough time to set up a good composition and look around for an alternative composition if I nail the first one or the conditions force me to move.

If you’ve been adding up the above getting time, you’ll see that I aim to get up 1 hour and 45 minutes before sunrise.

It’s good to have goals, right?

On the above photo, I woke up late, and got to the shore just as the light was about to peak. Luckily, I knew the shoreline well enough to find the wave pool and be setup within minutes of arriving.

Scouting is Key

One of the reasons that this works for me is that I’ve scouted the sunrise locations in advance. On the Lake Superior shoreline where I live, I’ve shot from every available piece of public land and some private land where I have permissions.

When I’m traveling, I’ll spend hours each day scouting sunrise and sunset locations. Some locations make this easy due to the way the landscape is arranged or if limited overlooks or clear views are available. On average, I’d guess that one out of every four scouted locations will work for a sunrise.

When scouting I’ll do general research on the internet, but I like to see locations with fresh eyes. That means that I’ll talk to friends, rangers and locals to get their ideas and then go look during the day. When on site, I’m looking for good foregrounds that align with the sunrise or sunset. I’ll make mental notes of each location: number of good foregrounds, where they are, potential angles based on imagined light and cloud conditions, hike times, any safety issues, etc... If I was smart, I’d make notes in a digital or physical notebook.

But I don’t.

Every now and them, I get stumped while scouting, and then and only then will I look for ideas on the internet or for a photo guidebook or other guidebook.

Set Up

Because I’ve scouted locations, I know where my potential compositions are going to be. They don’t always work out, but at least I have a starting point. I’ll pick one of my potential foregrounds and see if it is going to work with the sunrise.

You can see this in the above two photos. They are of the same spot. In the first, the light just wasn’t bright enough to reach into the back of the slot canyon, so I set up my shot closer to its opening. In the second, once the sun broke through that crack in the clouds I knew it would send light back into the canyon so I set up further back.

Once on site, I usually set up in the same way. I make my tripod chest level. I hook my Kinesis Gear F169 filter holder onto my tripod. If you buy direct and use the code “hansel15” you’ll save 15%. This bag holds all my filters and my filter holder.

Then I’ll put my camera on my tripod and add to the lens a filter holder for 100x150mm filters. On Lake Superior, I usually use a 100x150mm 3-stop Reverse ND Grad from Singh-Ray (buy direct and use the code “thathansel” for a 10% discount). If my composition is going to have a lot of water in it I use the 100x150mm Singh-Ray Bryan Hansel All-in-One ND Grad, which is a filter that I designed. I’ll put one of those two into the filter holder.

Note: I often use a 100x100mm Singh-Ray 5-stop Mor-slo ND filter in combination with my ND Grad. The ND Grad darkens the sky to allow the camera to capture a bright foreground. The ND filter darkens the scene completely and allows for a long exposure of about 1-2 seconds right at sunrise. The Mor-slo is usually added after the sky gets brighter.

At that point, I’m ready to go. I usually know how high I want the tripod. But it’s helpful to take the camera off and look through the viewfinder to find your composition and then set the tripod up where the camera wants to be. A good rule of thumb for tripod height is tripod height determines the size of the foreground. The lower you set it up, the bigger it gets.

The filter placement is set after the composition is complete. Basically, with the ND Grads, there’s a split in the center of the filter. The dark park goes over the sky. The spilt goes over the horizon. The clear part goes over the land and sea.

Composition

Next up is refining my composition. I use and teach a technique that uses Simplicity, Flow and Relationships to create my shots.

My first step is to imagine the simplest possible composition at the location that still looks like the spot. Then I add one or two compositional elements to it.

I’ll add a shape, line, pattern, texture or color (tone). I really like to work with shapes, like the roundish shape of the boulder in the above photo. I also like to use lines to help move a viewer’s eye through the photo, so I’ll often include lines. In the above photo, the shoreline is a line as is the line of basalt boulders on the right side of the photo. Both point to sunset.

After I figure out the simplicity of the shot, I’ll balance it visually left and right. I divide the shot in the middle and put an equal amount of visual weight on the left side and right side of the photo. I feel that for my work, this helps with flow. Flow is where you want your viewer’s eyes to start and where you want it to end.

In the above shot after I decided the shoreline and rock line would lead the viewer’s eyes to the sun, I needed something to draw it back. That’s when I decided to add the boulder to the left corner. I wanted to pull the viewer’s eyes back to the corner and the start of the strongest line.

Relationships are how the various parts of the shot come together. The more you can relate the different parts of the shot to each other, the stronger the shot. In this case, I think the strongest is the reflection of the sunset on the basalt. I wanted that reflection to reach back to the bottom of the photo, so I messed with the tripod height until it did. I also shot a bunch of different waves until I got the one that looked most like the ragged row of clouds.

It takes work to get the right composition. My original idea is in the shot below. It isn’t nearly as strong as the one from above. This was my original idea, but it wasn’t working with the sunset conditions I had so I had to move to a different one.

Decisive Moment

Once the composition is set up, I just wait for the decisive moment. That might be a peak in the color of the sky, a color shift, the right wave or something else. Sometimes the conditions will change so much that I’ll need to change my composition a bit to account for the changes.

Seldom will a landscape photographer know when the decisive moment will happen. They wait and photograph away until it does. I try to stay mindful and in the moment and aware of the changes happening before me. To me, a sunrise and a sunset is like watching life play out. It grows. It peaks. Then it starts to fade away. Sometimes as it fades away, it gets good again. By staying in the moment, I get a chance to watch all that happen — I get to watch a mini-life lived — and by staying in the moment it’s more likely to catch the decisive moment.

I often come away with dozens of shots of the sunset or sunrise, but there will always be the decisive one. I’ll often delete 80% of the others.

Sometimes the conditions change enough that you’ll get completely different feels in shots taken at the start of the sunrise or sunset and at the end. In the one below, it’s a second moment from the same sunset that I love and kept.

Lingering

After sunrise or sunset, I’ll often linger around looking for interesting details or other compositions. At sunset, I often wait 45 minutes after. Sometimes the sky can relight and be amazing. After sunrise if I have time, I’ll try to take advantage of the good light and photograph until the golden hour ends.

The hardest part for me is leaving. I love being outside. I dislike being in my office. So I linger.

Then I go edit images, answer emails, work on whatever needs to get done.

That’s it. A typical day.

Until next time

I hope that you found my working methods interesting. Let me know what you think or what you do in the comments.

It’s rare that I have a cancellation that nobody on the waiting list wants, so if you’ve wanted to get on a workshop the Bluff Country one is a good one. I always say that if photographers found out how good northeast Iowa is, it would become a fly-in destination. This filled up quickly last year, so snag the spot quickly if you are thinking about it.

Here’s a shot from one of the potential sunset locations on the workshop.

I’ll see you again in two weeks.