To be honest I don’t shoot many sunrises or sunsets. I suppose I have a bit of a bad attitude about them. Somwhere along the line I read something about those types of shots being some of the most cliched in the business. Something over-done like images of iconic locations like El Capitan, Old Faithful or Mount Rushmore. Even so I’ve had an Atlantic Beach sunrise shoot on my project board for a few months. I’ve been waiting for a day when everything would come together.

I wanted to include a fishing pier in a few of the shots and frankly, fishing piers are becomning rare pieces of Americana. Not so many years ago there were three of them along Atlantic Beach within walking distance of each other. Today only one or those remains and it is missing some off the end, a victim of Hurricane Irene. I honestly don’t know if it’s been open since the hurricane or if they have plans to repair it. It seemed that if I was going to do the shoot I had in mind I needed to do it soon!

A check of the weather forecast for this morning sounded perfectly. It was going to be overly cold and the forecast called for partly cloudy skies. Clouds help to add texture and interest to a sunrise photo. Plus timing is really convenient in the winter. The official sunrise time would be 7:10 making it possible to arrive an hour or so early without dragging myself out of bed too outrageously early. Below are a few of the images from the session. I think it was worth the effort.