I decided to catch the sunrise at Hunstanton Beach last week.  I’ve never been there before, so I did what planning I could using TPE, which was pretty much just determining which end of the beach to would be best to catch the sun.

I left at 0430 and got to the car park a couple of minutes after the sky started to do its thing.   Not the best planned trip at all!  I pulled up next to a ticket machine, bought a parking ticket, grabbed my gear and ran down to the beach.  Sunrise only lasts a few minutes and I’d already missed the start, so I wasn’t going to have time to find interesting bits of foreground interest.  I used what was immediately available; wet sand and shallow pools.

I used my Tokina ATX 116 PRO DX AF11-16mm F/2.8 lens with no filters; I wanted the sky reflecting off the pools and ripples in the sand, so a polarizer was not required.

I set the camera up fairly low to the ground so that the ripples in the sand would appear more prominent.  I used f/14 to increase the depth of field and took a 2 second exposure.

Having got the “shot in the bag”, I took a quick look around to see if there was anything interesting lying around and saw a moss covered rock a little way behind.  It was also quite close to another shallow pool, which had an interesting curve to it:

In my haste, I left my camera bag in the shot.  A couple of clicks in Adobe Lightroom soon fixed that.

After that, I started to explore so that I’d have a better idea of what to expect next time I came. A little further South, there are some nice rocks, but I think that they’re probably more suited to a sunset, rather than a sunrise.  There are also some small cliffs, which at sunrise are in the shade, so they’re probably more suited to a sunset when the nice sky colours will be reflected off them.