On the night of Tuesday, September 10th we were on the cusp of a 90 degree day and so I turned to my weather apps to try to predict the next morning’s sunrise conditions. I was disheartened to see clear skies in the forecast and turned to twitter to see if Matt Noyes might help me out. As a testament to his availability and knowledge, I received the following information from him that night:
“Well…the app likely says clear b/c it’s tied to computers which also mostly say clear after 3am clearing trend commences. But..Presence of cloud deck now, including sub-1000ft deck in SE MA and SW wind suggests Cape Ann may still see patchy clouds/fog til…sun has chance to burn it off. Which would happen quickly. So, pot’l for some really cool texture/sky just post sunrise……as you know, also pot’l for deck to hold an hour too long & then it’s just gray to sun. I’m betting on first of those two.”
With that knowledge in hand, I set the alarm for 4:45am so as not to miss any of the ‘blue hour’. I headed out at 5am on Wednesday, September 11th to the State Street Landing which offered the best line towards the sunrise. I ended up moving down a bit and found myself in front of the harbormaster’s office when I had finally worked out the compositions and angles.
This is the first image I took (5:45am). The sky was indeed clear overhead but the cloud deck was quite low and did an incredible job of reflecting the light from the rising sun. Marblehead harbor was quiet on this morning and the waters relatively still. I tried various combinations of exposure, aperture and ISO as the light brightened on this scene and found this one to be my favorite with the strong green light of Marblehead lighthouse reflecting in the water now painted pink-orange by the dawn.
This is the first of five images I will be sharing this week. All were taken on the morning of September 11th and each has a very different feel as the fog kept building. Thanks again to Matt Noyes for helping me predict the weather conditions that would lead to some very unique views of Marblehead Harbor at Dawn and beyond.
