The Light Before the Light

The half-hour before sunrise is the most under-photographed half-hour of the day, for the simple and unromantic reason that it requires having gotten up an hour earlier than you wanted to. The light is cool, the world is empty, and a great many of the photographs that hang in my studio were made in it.

Pre-dawn light is exposure-difficult and color-rare. It is also patient: it does not move as quickly as evening light. A photograph that takes you four minutes to compose at dawn will still be substantially the same photograph when you finally release the shutter. The same compositional luxury is almost never available at dusk.

There is a related, lesser-known phenomenon: the ten minutes immediately following sunrise, when the warmth has arrived but the shadows have not yet learned to point downhill. This is when you photograph rivers.