SHOOTING THE FIRST SUNRISE OF THE YEAR

Towards the end of 2013 my good friend and excellent photographer Scot Baston – cornerstone.photography posted on social media about photographing the first sunrise of the year.

So, somewhat bleary eyed and bewilderment, I climbed out of bed on January 1st 2013, woke my son ( to his horror) and we drove down to Bournemouth to witness the first sunrise of the year.

It felt so good to be out, blowing away any leftover cobwebs from the previous year, standing on an almost deserted beach, watching the sun coming up to welcome in the new year and a new start.

This started a tradition for me, every new year, no matter what we were doing (or how late we were up) the night before, my son and I will get up to witness the first “sunrise”. I use the term loosely, as in the eight years we have done this, our hit rate of actually seeing the sun is roughly 50%, including one particularly memorable new year’s day in 2014, where we drove to Portland Bill during a massive storm, being barely able to stand up due to the wind and getting soaked to the skin within 10 seconds of getting out of the car! But it still made for some good photography.

Thanks Scot, what a fantastic suggestion!

Some of my photos from those shoots are on the site here and also for the full album you can see them in a Flickr album here