I was up early for this one…

Around 6:45 a.m. I took my camera and tripod out into the cold to try to get a good shot of the amazing colors in the sunrise.  I wanted to manipulate my shutter speed to control the colors so that I didn’t have to do any post-editing.  The only thing that I used Photoshop for in these photos was to crop them, as they were large files.

I was able to make the photo lighter or darker depending on how slow I made the shutter speed and what ISO I used.  I tend to like darker images that make the color parts stand out more.  The “ray” effect was made by using a zoom lens and pulling it in or out while using a shutter speed of 2 seconds.

Folks tend to forget that you can control so many aspects of your photo in-camera and without post-manipulation.  We’ve made it really easy to get funky effects by the press of a button.  I just wanted to do it the old fashioned way today.