Lake Superior Sunrise Photography Workshop

Waking up before dawn has its rewards when you’re shooting a sunrise over Lake Superior. Photographers Hayes Scriven and Nicholas Narog lead a hands-on learning session to help shooters hone their early-morning capture & edit skills in this Lake Superior Sunrise Photography Workshop on Minnesota’s north shore, and I was fortunate to be in attendance.

The alarm rang at 4:30am. Luckily I went to sleep plenty early the night before and was wide awake as soon as I jumped out of bed. After a quick bite to eat I hopped in the truck and headed up highway 61.

The excitement of scooting up the north shore of Lake Superior and trying to capture a gorgeous sunrise helped the drive go nice & quick. It was pitch black when I left my house, but I had a vision for what the morning’s sunrise might be. Anyone who has spent time on Lake Superior knows the weather is predictably unpredictable, but let me give you a sneak preview — the clouds parted just enough to give us a wonderful sunrise that did not disappoint!

Instructors for the Lake Superior Sunrise Photography Workshop

Our two instructors for the day were photographer Nicholas Narog & photographer Hayes Scriven. Both gents have tremendous experience capturing images all along Minnesota’s north shore — from waterfalls to ships to the aurora borealis and so much more. In fact, Hayes is also the Site Manager at Split Rock Lighthouse so he’s got a daily front-row seat to the incredible wonders the north shore of Lake Superior has to offer.

Make sure you check out their work at the links below and follow them on their social media channels. They have some truly spectacular images that celebrate the majesty of Lake Superior that you’ll likely want to purchase and hang in your home.

Location of the Lake Superior Sunrise Photography Workshop

My home base was about 35 minutes south of the workshop’s location: Larsmont Cottages just south of Two Harbors, MN. The resort is set on 40 acres, including 1,300 feet of pristine Lake Superior shoreline. Our photography workshop took place in one of their conference spaces — a cozy, well-equipped room with the right mix of technology and a view of the lake right out the floor-to-ceiling windows.

I didn’t get a chance to eat at the Ledge Rock Grille restaurant, but the same evening I was there they were having a multi-course Hygge-inspired dinner. The restaurant itself has a fantastic vibe and one of these days I’ll make it back up there to attend an event like the Hygge Dinner at Larsmont Cottages’ Ledge Rock Grille.

Larsmont Cottages
596 Larsmont Way
Two Harbors, MN 55616
Phone: (866) 687-5634

What we Learned at the Lake Superior Sunrise Photography Workshop

Our group of students for the day included both hobbyists and aspiring professional photographers. It was a great mix of people to get a wide variety of questions that helped us all learn a bit more. And during the class we focused on two areas: in-camera capturing of the sunset and editing our photos using the Adobe Lightroom software.

Capturing Lake Superior Sunrise Photos

Way back when in the good’ol days I used to shoot a lot of photos for a marketing & live events company. I was never a trained photographer, more of a point-and-shoot guy with a decent enough eye for composition to satisfy the clients. I always seemed to be too busy to really learn the fundamentals of photography beyond what I’d learned in my basic black & white photography class back in college.

So for this Lake Superior sunrise photography workshop I dusted off my old Canon 60D DSLR camera with its 18-200 kit lens to see what I could learn. In all honesty, I was seriously considering the purchase of a shiny new camera prior to taking this workshop but I’m really happy I held off. Both the instructors really helped me realize that learning how to use a DSLR (or mirrorless) camera in fully manual mode to capture photos of various subjects in a wide variety of lighting conditions is really fun no matter what model of camera you happen to have in your hand.

When we all walked down to the shore just as the light of day started breaking, our instructors gave us some hints as to what we might want to work on for the composition of our sunrise photos. Once we had all picked out or first locations, they came by and worked with us individually and gave each of us guidance catered to our level of experience.

For me the key points I took away from the sunrise shooting session were:

• Start with a higher ISO (around 800) and work your way down as the daylight increases
• Start with a shutter speed around 1/10 of a second (if on a tripod) and an f-stop of around 5.6 — the slower shutter speed helps smooth out the water and the f-stop of 5.6 helps with both light acquisition and depth of field
• Work your way up on the f-stops as the daylight increases, but max out the aperture around f-11

As I continued to shoot while the sunrise began to peek out (and with a few more helpful hints from the instructors) I found myself pulling the camera off the tripod, lowering the camera + my body closer to the ground, and gravitating toward settings more like this:

• ISO of 100 (the lowest my Canon 60D allows)
• Aperture between 5.6-11
• Shutter speed around 1/60
• PRO TIP: Capture darker vs lighter — if you blow out the whites/light areas you can’t get anything back, but there’s generally a lot of detail that can be pulled out of the shadows, which you’ll see in the Lightroom editing example in the next section

Here are a couple examples of the sunrise shots I was able to capture, along with their settings:

Editing Lake Superior Sunrise Photos Using Adobe Lightroom

As the sun continued to rise we all shot more photos along the shoreline. It was interesting to try and capture more of the sky colors reflecting off the clouds in the sky and the elements along the shore as the light conditions changed. Then, it was back inside for some hands-on lab work editing our morning’s captures.

We all brought our own laptops running Adobe Lightroom, and our instructors had their computer hooked up to the large monitor in the conference room. As they walked us through some of the images they had shot alongside us that morning, we got a good sense of their approach to editing photos in these lighting conditions.

Some key points for editing sunrise photos in Lightroom:

• Use the Edit panel’s “Auto” function to give yourself a good starting point based on what the software suggests for your image, then fine-tune those settings to your preferences
• The Lightroom masking tool allows you to easily isolate the sky from the foreground elements to make specific adjustments
• Duplicate and invert the sky mask to create a mask for the foreground, and you can pull details from shadows differently than you might for the sky
• The Texture, Clarity, and Dehaze tools in Lightroom’s Edit panel are powerful, but use them sparingly since they have rather distinct impacts on specific elements of your photographs
• The Heal and Content-Aware Remove functions on Lightroom’s Healing panel are solid methods to remove items that may be distracting from the primary focal area of your photo — it takes a little practice to use these effectively but the results can be impressive

Overall, the Lake Superior Sunrise Photography Workshop lead by Nicholas Narog & Hayes Scriven was a fantastic learning experience. The clouds continued to clear throughout the morning and I was inspired to continue shooting photos along the north shore as I drove home, stopping in various turnouts to meander down closer to the water. I’d definitely recommend attending their courses in the future so be sure to follow them on their social media channels listed above to hear about their next sessions.