Sunrise with Erika Val
Picture the scene: A beautiful serene lake on acres of landscaped grounds, with it’s own boat house and a 3 arch bridge crossing it at the end . Frost and mist clinging to the ground with soft beautiful golden light rising from the east. A more or less monochromatic scene broken only by a lonely figure wearing a bright red dress, wandering by the lake. Can you picture it?
Well if you can, the picture in your mind is about as far from reality as you can get from the scene that faced us yesterday on the shoot. The lake and boat house were all there, as was the model in the red dress. After having carefully checked the weather forecast over the last few days in an particular on both the evening before and the morning of the shoot, we decided to make the effort to get up early to be on location for the beautiful sun rise that was promised. But the weather and the light (or lack thereof) were terrible. It was misty, flat and just generally yuck 
I know you can never plan on weather in Ireland, but how can the forecasters get it so wrong, so consistently?
Erika Val was the model on the day and even though the light and weather let us down, she certainly didn’t 
As we had both made the effort to be there at that time of the day, we shot off a series of images anyway. But to be honest, I don’t think either of our hearts were in it. From a techie point of view, I was interested to see the ISO performance @ ISO2000, which is what this image was taken at and to be honest I am very impressed. Yes of course it’s noisy, but no where near the point of it not being a useable image.
Anyway once the sun had finally risen (behind the mist), we decided to pack up and move on. After warming up over breakfast and coffee, it was a case of plan B – back to my kitchen So it was out with the tri-flash bracket again and 86″ umbrella and we just played for the remainder of the day. Lots of fun
