Amami Superman Photography

Yesterday night I decided to wake up early to go take some photos in the early morning light. Sunrise was at 7:16AM this morning so I woke up at 5:45AM and headed out at 6:00AM. I got to the spot about 20 minutes before sunrise and the sky was getting pretty light. Though it was getting brighter out, it was still very dark under the canopy of trees where I took my photos and I had to watch my footing as I climbed. Once I got my camera on my tripod, I took a shot with my flash to get my bearings. You can see in this photo how dark it still was 20 minutes before sunrise.

After getting situated in the right spot I started to take photos. I try not to set my ISO above 400 if possible so my first couple of shots I set my ISO to 200 and my shutter speed around 10 seconds. This brought some OK results but the photos were still under exposed. I tried slower shutter speeds but it was pretty windy this morning and all my shots had some motion blur in them somewhere. This next photo was taken about 15 minutes before sunrise and the shutter speed was 13 seconds.

It was about this time that I noticed the stupid branch poking out of the water in front of me and promptly removed it from my line of sight. I took photo after photo hoping I would get lucky with the wind but it wasn't in the dice this morning. I took around 70 photos in about an hour's time. I ended up choosing this photo to share with you all. Here is the original untouched photo.

Photo settings:
8.0 sec Shutter priority
Aperture value: f/11
ISO 100
18-55 mm f/3.5-5.6 lens

This was one of the better photos with the least amount of motion blur in the tree leaves. I like the original the way it is but I thought I would retouch it in Photoshop and adjust the saturation/hue and give it a soft glowing effect. This is what I came up with.

I'm going to have to go back to this spot a few more times and try to take some more photos under better conditions.

So there you have it! My first post in my brand new blog. I'm going away for business over the weekend so I won't have a chance to get out there and take some photos. But I'll be back next week and we'll see what we can do.