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I decided to set the alarm for 06:00 in the hope of catching a decent sunrise. A sunrise is something I have never shot before (I know, terrible!), and autumn, with the darker mornings, makes a sunrise much more accessible than in high summer!

Getting up wasn’t really a problem, as this is the same time I usually wake up for work, but I’m on holiday today. After a quick cup of coffee I was out the door and arrived at the South Head by around 06:20.

The sun was beginning to show signs of breaking the horizon at this point, so I set up the tripod on the sea wall at the old RNLI Lifeboat shed, attached the spirit level to the hotshoe, plugged in the remote shutter release cable. At an aperture of f/8 and ISO set to 100, the camera’s exposure meter told me 4 seconds for a proper exposure, but as with sunsets, I wanted to under-expose this shot a little to saturate the colours, and went for a 2 second exposure instead.

After taking several shots like the one above, I moved the small distance along the shore to the remains of Stevenson’s Breakwater. The sun was now  rising quite nicely above the horizon, and the rain was holding off enough to keep the sky looking interesting and allowing me to stay dry. In fact, at this point the cloud and sunrise combination was pretty spectacular, and I wanted to capture more of it. I switched to the Sigma 10-20 mm lens, dialled in 1/4 second (underexposed again) at f/22.0  and ISO 100, then took the following shot at 12 mm.

After taking this fairly panoramic view with the very wide Sigma lens, I switched back to the Canon EF 17-40mm f/4 L USM and took a slightly tighter photo, placing the ruined breakwater in the foreground.

The colour changes in the sky during sunrise are quite amazing, although I’m sure the changeable light levels, caused by moving cloud, contributed to this somewhat.

By 07:20 the clouds to the north-west of me were looking pretty dire, and I could feel spots of rain landing on my hood. I quickly fired off the next two shots from down on the rocks at the back of the breakwater, if these were going to be the last two shots of the day, then they’d do me – the sky was at its most spectacular at this point!

Sure enough, the heavens opened with some large rain drops, the camera was quickly thrown into the bag, and I was quickly heading for home. Looking back at the rainy sky I wasn’t at all disappointed by my shooting being interrupted, the sky was now just that of a gloomy Caithness morning.