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When the daylight hours are short head out for first light to capture those amazing skies and warm natural light

There is nothing better on a crisp winter morning than watching the sun rising over the horizon and breaking through the clouds. Winter is the perfect time of year to shoot sunrise: for starters you don’t need to wake up at stupid o’clock in the morning to be there! Our sunrise was taken at 7.40am, which meant leaving the house at a reasonable 6.30am to be there on time.

For our landscape shoot, we headed up to a viewpoint at Gallants Bower, near Dartmouth Castle in Devon, and composed our shot looking out over the sea at the mouth of the River Dart. In the distance, we used an iconic landmark called The Daymark to sit within the rule of thirds, then framed the foliage in the foreground to add interest.

We opted to shoot using a wide-angle lens (15-30mm on a full-frame camera): that meant we could include lots of the wonderful sky, which really came alive once the sun had broken through. Finally, to add that extra sparkle to our sunrise shot, we were lucky enough to capture a flock of birds soaring through the sky at the optimum moment!

It’s all about patience and waiting for these moments to happen: we did a whole lot of waiting around to get one shot that morning.