Sunrise At Victoria Peak – Hong Kong

Golden Rays of an Eastern Sunrise

There comes a point when a photographer begins to doubt the intentions of the weather gods. After four 4:00am wake ups, and four failed sunrise shoots, my faith was beginning to wane. As we slowly meandered to our usual spot, way up high on Victoria peak, it was too dark to make an accurate assessment of the cloud cover.

Once we’d set up our cameras, we sat on the ground and waited. As blue hour began to unfold a small sliver of orange cut across the horizon. If only that gap could stay open long enough for the sun to pass by it!

We waited, and waited, and the gap began to close. I was feeling anxious. Yet, as fate would have it, the only section of the gap that didn’t close was exactly the space we needed. As the sun rose, it peaked through this tiny space and give us around ten minutes of gentle colour. It was all we needed.

And, as quickly as it arrived, it had disappeared. It was by no means a dramatic sunrise, but we both felt it was worth the wait. We didn’t return the next morning. It was time to give our bodies some much needed rest.

Today’s Photo – Hong Kong Skyline

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This was a very interesting image to process. I was stuck in two minds. On the one hand, I had a nice blue hour shoot, with plenty of mood. On the other, I had a sunrise image with some colour in the sky but the city was flat and grey, as the city lights had slowly been turned off.

Therefore, to create an image with the greatest amount of mood, I decided to combine the two scenes. In my imagery, mood always comes first. If an image doesn’t evoke an emotional response in me I won’t publish it, even if it’s cleanly processed and nice enough to look at it.

I created a balanced blue hour shot by combining 3 exposures with luminosity masks. Then I placed the sunrise shot on top of those 3 layers. Since this was shot at a different focal distance than the other three exposures, I selected all 4 exposures and used the Auto-Align function (Edit>Auto-Align), to line them up.

Then I created a black mask on the sunrise layer, making it invisible, and with a white brush set at 50% opacity, I started to gently paint in the area of the sky with the sunrise. To add more colour to that region of the sky, I painted in some warm colours. You can learn how to do this in a tutorial I wrote recently: How To Add Warmth To a Sunset or Sunrise.

Through a Color balance layer I increased the greens, while removing a small amount of the blue colour cast.

I used Nik Color Efex to increase local contrast, and used the Darken/Lighten Center filter to brighten the sky and create a gentle vignette around the rest of the image.

Before/After Comparison