HOW TO SHOOT A SUNRISE

HOW TO SHOOT A SUNRISE - A TUTORIAL

”Golf “ wrote Mark Twain famously “is the best way to ruin a perfectly good walk.”

Safe to say this can go for photography too, so here are some tips on how to make yourself truly miserable with a camera, early in the morning.

This week I was supposed to be giving my right hand a rest. Nonetheless I spent a good part of the time wielding a camera or “editing” my photos like a sulking child with a colouring book. And now I’m writing about it. Probably I should apologise in advance.

First up, you need to be the kind of person who wakes up at five in the morning. Like Canute and the tide, you cannot compel the sun to have a lie-in. If you like your bed, sunrises are not for you.

And If you live in Britain, you will know the sun takes most of the year off in any case, preferring to lounge around in the Mediterranean, California, the Kalahari desert. The upside for British people is they are not yet dying from climate-change-induced heat exhaustion. The downside is, every day is like the kind of duvet Sunday where you dont mind having a hangover.

And so.

Check the weather forecast and then ignore it. The met office employs over two thousand people and they are ALL somehow wrong, even though they mostly, literally have one job.

If you are up north remember “it’s quite mild” means -5C

If you are in Devon, where it is still 1973, bear in mind car parks often still require COINS

Are you addicted to caffeine? Embrace it, you’ will need 16 cups of coffee. It’s dawn, remember.

Toilets. You’re gonna need those too. Keep an eye out for public toilets, particularly for when that first jolt of caffeine lights the touch paper to the gunpowder plot of your bowels. Last night’s curry with your daughter (speaking rhetorically of course) may have been delicious, but the raging volcano of your butt at 5.30 in the morning is not something to deal with behind a bush with nothing but a discarded copy of the Sun. Although this IS the best use for the Sun, obviously.

Be aware that even though it is very pretty, nature is mostly completely horrible - often the grass is soaking, seeping through the not-walking-shoes you were idiot enough to slip your feet into; , the wind may well freeze your nads off, or, alternatively, you are already as hot and sweaty as a rhino in a sauna and the insects are already hungering for your blood. And dont expect nature to fall in line with your plans. Expect dogs. Their walkers take them out at dawn and they love to prance around barking at you. The dogs do too. Animals are dreadful generally; once, on a documentary, I lost my patience with a butterfly that wouldnt hold still for my camera and called it a c***. I dont think I was wrong.

Do not ask the locals where a good spot is- they literally don’t know anything about where they live. They only know about Taylor Swift, top dogging spots, and Pokemon.

When you arrive at your well-researched spot, you will find there are several good vantage points for when that rare but glorious yellow thing we call the sun looks like it may peek through. But also that there is a very small window before the sun will rise so high it will burn out on your camera’s sensor. So you should run between those vantage points like a flailing, gasping, panic-stricken fire warden, your jowls wobbling like jelly in a muslin bag, your man boobs flapping against your camera strap like swollen udders slapping against a milking stool.

And finally, though it should go without saying, make sure to charge your batteries before setting out. For example, this morning, I overnight-charged the one camera battery I brought with me. Importantly, I also forgot, in my tiredness, to actually take it out of the charger and insert it in the camera, ensuring that I turned up at the perfect sunrise location WITHOUT A USABLE CAMERA.

My little drone shoots phone-quality 12mp stills, so while I did get some fun video of the sunrise, the yachts and the shipwreck, the glorious photos I might have captured never happened. Genius.

I hope this all helps. Probably you havent even got out of bed yet. No Photographers were killed in the making of this post, but we live in hope.

adam rowleyOctober 21, 2023Comment

Mar 21, 2023

HOW MUCH DOES A CORPORATE VIDEO COST?

YOU KNOW WHAT YOU WANT TO SAY AND HOW YOU WANT TO SAY IT, BUT WHAT IS YOUR BUDGET?

How much will my film cost? Is inevitably our first question. The unhelpful answer is of course, how long is a piece of string? You may want a simple one-day, one-man shoot with a quick one-day edit, and you can probably get that for under a grand if you’re not too fussy and it really is just a one-day edit. Or you might want an ambitious creative concept, with lots of pre-production followed by a complex week-long shoot, filming on a RED camera, and lots of complicated compositing and animated graphics. And that could be £20 - £30 000. Or more.

Mar 20, 2023

WHY YOU HIRE A PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER

So here’s the cruel irony. Even though I know I possess the kind of staggering youthful good looks that make people catch their breath and drop their falafel when they meet me in real life, on camera I look like a laboratory experiment where the mad scientist has injected the DNA of Brendan Gleason and Charles Manson into a old potato

And being self-conscious - oh my crooked smile, oh my seventy-eight chins - means I forget that my delicious eyes are like limpid emerald pools you could drown in, and I project discomfort - In short, I don’t pose well. Maybe you do. Millions of others dont. And some of them work for you.

Mar 16, 2023

TESTIMONIAL VIDEOS, WHAT ARE THEY GOOD FOR?

WHY THE BEST WAY TO SELL YOUR PEOPLE IS TO USE YOUR PEOPLE

Back in the mists of time, every corporate video had an ambitious narrative, like a storyboarded long-form commercial, a piece of expensive, styled, authored creative in its own right. These films do still get made and they are great. I make them myself, though more usually I work in short form. Is this always how you want to disseminate your information, your brand, your company? Sometimes yes. Just as sometimes you want to Ronseal it, to say it like it is. But do you want to be that blunt? Again probably not.

WHY SPEND MONEY ON A PROFESSIONAL VIDEOGRAPHER?

WHAT VALUE DOES A PROFESSIONAL VIDEOGRAPHER ACTUALLY BRING TO THE PARTY?

Sure so this is where you get sold all the corporate and advertising cliches about brand identity and adding value to your message and blah blah blah. And you may not be thinking in those terms, but rather about just demonstrating something seemingly quite simple.

CAN ONE PERSON SHOOT PHOTOGRAPHY AND VIDEOGRAPHY AT AN EVENT?

YOU NEED A PHOTOGRAPHER , AND YOU ALSO WANT A CORPORATE VIDEOGRAPHER, BUT YOUR BUDGET PAYS FOR ONLY ONE OF THEM - WHAT DO YOU DO?

The short answer is of course some people can do both. The challenge is finding someone who is genuinely good at both, which is not as easy as it sounds. There are plenty of great photographers out there who can’t really shoot video. There are some good videographers out there, though they are no nearly so easy to find, and some of them are competent photographers too.

Mar 5, 2023

WHY EITHER EVERYONE OR NO ONE NEEDS TO WORRY ABOUT AI

With the announcement that China-based NetDragon Websoft says it is the first company in the world to appoint an AI as its CEO only to see stocks soar, naturally it isn’t just struggling bloggers and graphic designers who are worried about the implication of AI

This is where I’d like to reassure you that climate change ravaging the planet and making the lives of those few who survive the catastrophic flooding, wild fires and raging hurricanes that are predicted absolute hell.

HOW TO SHOOT A SUNRISE

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