Sunrise at Port Bruce

The St Thomas Photographic Guild met down at Port Bruce for some sunrise photos.  We got extremely lucky to find some shards of ice all jammed up at the mouth of the river.  Jim Kirkwood and myself decided to get up early and head down by 6:00am.  The sky had amazing blue and violet tones and we stumbled on a view as we were driving east that we both thought would be great.  We looked at each other wondering why we didn't stop.  So therefore we pulled a "U" turn and set up our equipment at the top of the hill.  This is the view we discovered:

At first we went down to the main beach to set up for a landscape shot with the lighthouse, but the more I looked at the view I decided it wasn't quite what I was looking for.  The pier had a build up of Ice that I felt would interfere with the sunrise, so I picked everything up and walked up the beach to the pier.  When I looked over to the other side I was surprised to find the amount of ice built up along the mouth of the river.

At first I had set up with my Nikon 24-20mm f2.8, but after looking at the focal range I decided I would be better off with the Nikon 70-200mm f2.8.  I definitely made the right decision but I made it a few seconds to late.  The sun peaked over the edge of the horizon with a beautiful sharp red colour, just a little strip of light sneaking over the waters edge just as I was putting the 200mm on my camera.  However when I did get my lens on I was successful with capturing the sun rising, but I missed the initial peak.  After looking at my photos later, I found that I liked the images that I captured a few minutes later when the sun was higher.  It created an awesome reflection off the ice and I was able to add to it by creating some lens flare and star burst in the second image below, by moving my "f" stop to f22 and removing my lens hood. I also like how the windmills are a soft silhouette along the Horizon.  Here are the images looking out to the sunrise:

To finish off my morning I wanted to get something a little different so I snuck out along the edge of the pier and the Frozen mountain of ice to get up close to the lighthouse.  By climbing up on the Ice, I was able to get a slightly different view like the image above and these ones of the lighthouse below:

And...... the opposite point of view at 24mm below.  :)  I hope you enjoyed these photos and please like and share my link on Facebook if you did.  Thank you again.  Corey Gardiner.