I did the "sun rising over the ocean" shtick last year, so this year I decided to do an indirect rise; catching the first light reflected from the Seacliff Bridge which runs between Coalcliff and Clifton in the Illawarra. It's one of the Illawarra's more iconic sights and was created set out from the cliffs to overcome the issues of falling rocks and the crumbling of the old roadway. It was also 10 years old last year, so it's due to be featured.

A few problems.

First, although I intellectually know where the Seacliff Bridge is, I seldom drive up that way so I always underestimate how long it will take to get there. The road up there is a winding "one lane each way" track with no overtaking lanes. This is more of a complicating issue when coming south, since you invariably get dimwits who can't do more than 50 in a 60 zone and invariably have to brake and drop to 25 on any curve which is more acute than 175 degrees. In some cases they are looking at the scenery, oblivious to the local traffic banking up behind them, and not wanting to bother to stop and admire the scenery at any of the dozen or so scenic lookouts along the route which would give them a better view and allow the traffic to clear.

Second, all of those aforementioned lookouts are on the opposite side of the road to you when you're heading north, and for the most part you cannot (safely, or in some cases legally) cross to get there. So I had to drive right along the bridge (it continues way beyond the far curve that you see here) up to the next suburb to the north, past the next street which is a "no right turn" one, on to the next one where I could do a right turn, turn into that, do a U turn, head back to the south of the bridge AND do all of that before the warm light of sunrise started hitting it.

Third, the Olympus' auto white balance is sometimes a tad questionable in non-standard light conditions. On overcast mornings by the ocean, it can look like you're shooting through a lens that is 90% sapphire. In the case of this light, the default images (bearing in mind that these are raw, so "default" is a questionable term) seemed distinctly "flat" with the colour temperature being way, way more shifted to the blue (I think I see a pattern here) than it should have been. Still, raw images; those can be straightened out. However that proved unnecessary.

I have no idea what inspired me to do it but I decided to take a couple of HDR brackets as well. In the case of this one, it was 7 frames from -6 to +6 at 2 stop increments. When all the King's Photoshop and all the King's Bridge reassembled Humpty, they did so in a way that was almost spot on in terms of the correct colour. It was just fractionally green shifted (as per the breaking waves), so I applied a Color Balance adjustment layer but tweaked each band (shifting to red, magenta and yellow respectively) by single digits; a little goes a long way with that filter.

And this is pretty much what I saw. That is, aside from the crowd of (mostly) Japanese tourists behind me (the bridge stretched off a ways that way too) who were all viewing the sunrise through their smartphones. Including some who were parked in a little alcove of rock on the far side of the road, and kept dashing across the road from their car to the walkway and back, climbing over the metal barrier that, seriously guys, was put there for a reason.

Happy new year, all.