I took this image during sunrise in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. There were storms forecasted for later in the day so I thought I had a good chance at some dramatic skies in the morning. Turns out I was correct.

For just a few minutes the skies exploded with some vibrant pink clouds. I knew I didn't have long so I rushed to put my filter kit on my camera as fast as I could. Using a 10 stop ND filter I had enough time to do 1 exposure of about 2 minutes. The clouds were moving nice and fast so I got some good streaks in the sky.

After that I was looking for something to use as a foreground element but there was nothing. So, I decided to move my camera closer to the water and as low as I could without getting wet. I fired off a few exposures around 1/3 of a second to still have some nice texture in the water.

I wasn't sure any of this was going to work but when I got them on the computer I decided to replace the sky of one of the 1/3 second exposures with the long exposure sky. This allowed me to still have the nice textured water with the streaks in the sky. I was pleasantly surprised with the result.

Shot on Sony a7iii, Zeiss 16-35mm and NiSi filter system.