I took this photograph on July 17th at 5:08 AM in Montreal, at Plage de l’Est.
Montreal is a big city. However, I found many places free of visual distractions appropriate for capturing sunrises and sunsets.
Before leaving home, as always, I checked the Photographer’s Ephemeris app to confirm whether the location was appropriate to capture the sunrise, which would occur at 5:21 AM. The weather forecasts were very good! They said that it would be a clear sky, with no clouds! In my mind, I thought that I would be lucky enough to capture the colored scene in the background a few minutes before sunrise.
I had in mind a scene captured a few weeks before at this location. Thirteen minutes before sunrise, I was flabbergasted to see the colored scene in the background with a blue sky and the reflections on the calm river.
To capture the scene, I wanted to include the shoreline and the vegetation on the left side and the small tree on the distant right side.
At 16mm, my lens was unable to capture the whole scene. This scene was too large. Consequently, I opted to take three overlapping shots to create a panorama. Before pressing the shutter, I worried about the scene’s dynamic range. I didn’t hesitate to set my camera to bracket three shots with two-stop increments between each shot to capture the scene’s huge dynamic range. I would create an HDR panorama image in Lightroom.
Using the nine bracketed files, Lightroom created the final HDR panorama file.
Looking at this beautiful scene reminds me of the beauty of nature.
