It was raining during most of the night. Around 3.30am, I got up and thought to try my luck: hoping the rain would stop before sunrise. By the time 4.40am, I arrived at Maroubra - Sydney's east coast. But it was still rain. However, I could see the sky was getting clearer. 15 minutes later, the rain just stopped and the sky started to change dramatically.

I wanted to maximize the dramatic sky without compromising the powerful foreground. Obviously one frame was not large enough to capture them all. So this image was a result from two sets of overlapped images: one focused on the foreground with a small portion of the sky (two shots), and one focused on the sky with a small portion of the foreground (three shots). Altogether five images were then stitched and blended together to produce this final image.


During these shootings, two GND and one ND filters were used to balance the light between the sky and foreground water and rocks. TK mask luminosity techniques were used for post process.