Dawn

The half hour nobody photographs

Everyone talks about golden hour. Almost nobody gets up for the hour before it, when there is light but no sun, and the whole landscape is lit from everywhere at once. Shadows have not been invented yet. Colour is thin and slightly blue, and it changes faster than you can change a lens.

I started keeping this journal because I kept forgetting what the light had actually done. Photographs remember the result. They do not remember that the mist lifted in four minutes, or that the birds started twenty minutes before the sun.

On metering for a sky that is still deciding

Spot metering fails here, because there is no highlight to anchor to. I have settled on metering the ground and letting the sky blow out slightly, then pulling it back later. The alternative is a correctly exposed sky above a black field, which is honest but dull.

Twice now I have arrived too late by ten minutes and found the whole thing already over.

The other lesson is to stop chimping. The back of the camera lies about contrast in low light, and the temptation to fiddle costs you the frame you came for.

A short list of things worth waking for

Standing water of any kind, because it doubles the sky. Anything with a hard edge against the horizon — a gate, a mast, a bare tree. Livestock, which are awake before you are and arrange themselves better than you could ask. And fog, obviously, though fog is a gift and cannot be planned for.

What is not worth it: sunrises over open ground with nothing in the middle distance. I have a folder of those. They are all the same photograph.