If I had to choose one and only one time of day to photograph, I would choose the few minutes just before the sun comes over the horizon. Some of this is because of technical reasons, such as lower contrast and more saturated colors, that make photography easier.
But, the main reason I enjoy this time of day is because of how peaceful and serene it is early in the morning. There are few people up and about. Everything is quiet and calm, and you can lose yourself in your own thoughts. The weather is irrelevant. Whether the sky is clear or cloudy, whether it’s foggy or raining, the sense of tranquility, for me, stays the same.
This was certainly the feeling I had when I visited the Two Rivers Bridge area in Little Rock recently. The weather forecast was for mostly cloudy skies but not completely overcast and a possibility of rain. I questioned whether I should bother getting up and going, but I remembered one of my goals this year was to go out and photograph regardless of what the conditions might be. So, I loaded up my equipment and headed out.
Reaching the location, the sky appeared to have fewer clouds than expected, so I thought I might be able to get some images of the clouds catching some amazing colors that happen just before the sun comes up. Unfortunately, the sun was coming up in a pretty overcast part of the sky that was farther south than I expected, so the colors I was anticipating did not materialize as I had hoped.
As I began to head back to the main path and continue on, I saw this bench and immediately thought about how nice it would be to just sit there with no one around enjoying the cool air and listening to the birds chirping and tweeting in the early morning stillness. But, this thought quickly turned into the decision that it might make for a nice picture.
It took some time to find the right shooting location. My original spot had a distracting limb coming in from the upper right part of the frame. I tried to zoom in to eliminate it, but that started pushing the tree on the left to close to the edge. After several steps up, back, left, and right, I finally found this perspective where the distracting branch was gone, the tree and bench were not crowding the edges of the frame, and I could include a fair amount of sky that contained some subtle color.
Because the sky was so much brighter than the foreground bench area, I knew that I would end up with either a highly underexposed foreground or highly overexposed sky. Neither was a good choice. I decided my best option was to use the HDR technique where I take several pictures at different exposure values and combine those images into a single photograph later in Lightroom or Photoshop. This worked very well, and, after some final tweaks and adjustments, I was able to create this final image.