Whenever I visit Florida, I always try to go to the beach to photograph the sunrise. Some of my favorite pictures are sunrise beach shots.
I was in Florida for two days last week, and so I went down to the beach both days to shoot the sunrise. Alas, the clouds did not cooperate with my plans, as there was overcast weather pretty much the entire time I was there.
My weather app showed that there wasn’t going to be a decent sunrise. I considered sleeping in instead, but in the end, I went anyway since I’ve known my app to be wrong sometimes.
Day 1
Sure enough, when I got to the beach at Lake Worth, I saw immediately that there was essentially no chance for a good sunrise. A wall of dark clouds stood firm on the horizon, preventing the sun from shining through. Nonetheless, I decided to take the opportunity to try other things. Among the things I tried that day was a long exposure photograph.

To achieve this shot, I left the shutter open for three minutes. Because the shutter was open for such a long time, any motion in the water was blurred out, leaving this highly deceptive image of a peaceful and calm ocean when the ocean was anything but peaceful and calm that morning.
Day 2
The second (and last) morning there was only marginally better. While there was still a wall of clouds on the horizon, it didn’t seem as thick.
This time around, I decided to try capturing waves. The great thing about wave photos is that every one is different. You could literally shoot a photo every second and never come away with the same shot twice.
Here are two of the shots I got that morning.


Eventually, however, my patience paid off on Day 2. Shortly after when sunrise should have been, the sun peaked out from the clouds. I quickly rushed to grab a shot:

Although I did, in the end, manage to get a sunrise photo (of sorts), I still managed to make good use of the time when the sun wasn’t present. True, I didn’t get a sunrise shot, but I did manage to produce some other nice-look images that I would not have otherwise made.
When Life Gives You Lemons…
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