A cold winter morning - 10 minutes before sunrise.

When you’re out near a mountain lake in the middle of winter, often the last thing you want to do is crawl out of bed half an hour before dawn in order to take photos. Especially if it were cloudy the night before.

But when you do it, you’ll find that you’re glad that you did. The picture above was taken ten minutes before the sun peeked over the mountains one cold winters morning. Getting up wasn’t easy, but the resulting photo session was more than worth it, especially as I was shooting mid-week when the tourist crowds were absent and thus had the whole lakefront to myself.

Obviously it’s not just winter that you can do this. Getting up early anytime of year can give you photographic rewards that you just won’t find any other time of day. So set that alarm and have an early night.

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