Standing on a hillside overlooking the San Quirico d'Orcia Valley in Tuscany, Italy, I patiently waited for the sun to rise.

As every landscape photographer knows, the golden hours at dusk and dawn provide the best opportunities for capturing the best light of the day, and no better place to experience this quality of light is in Tuscany at dawn.

At 05:00, as the sun started to rise, the first sprinkles of sunlight started peeping over the horizon and then slowly started lighting up the hills and the valley below. I captured this particular image at 05:06.