Earlier this week I set my alarm for 5am and dragged myself out of bed by 5.15 so that I could take some pictures of the City of London with the first light shining on it from the east. After a few test shots and finding a good spot to set up my tripod, I took my first serious shot at 6.26. I needed the tripod because, to the camera, it was essentially still dark at this point.

All images in this blog have been taken by me. Click on the centre of any of the images to see them in full screen size. Give it a try, they open in a beautiful lightbox.

I was focussed on looking to the west to catch the light shining on the buildings but I could see behind me a beautiful redness starting to creep into the sky on the horizon. It was tempting to go and have a proper look but I got on with the job in hand and concentrated.

The reason I needed the City of London images is that I’m currently working on a digital art series with a focus on these buildings. And I was determined not to lose concentration after getting up at 5am!

I took my last shot of the City at 6.45 and now I could relax and turn to the view in the east. I was very lucky in my timing because as I turned the sun was just rising above the horizon. It was an awesome moment. People hurrying to work were slowing down to take in the view and grab a few photos before they rushed on again. This was the first sunrise I’d seen in 2026 and I guess for most other passers by it might have been the same because we’ve had a lot of grey cloudy weather in London over January and February this year.

This is my first quick shot of that moment at 6.51.

Here we’re looking downriver, with Rotherhithe on the right and the towers of Canary Wharf in the background on the left.

I then moved along Tower Bridge to get a better composition.

When I got home and I was washing up the breakfast dishes, I watched part 2 of a HENI talk about the very first Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1874. I don’t usually listen to podcasts. I’m realising that I really prefer visuals, even if it’s two people sitting at a desk talking. I’m subscribed to HENI on YouTube so I saw it pop up there. The huge advantage to watching it on YouTube is that they show some of the paintings which were part of that exhibition. And one of the paintings they focussed on was Monet’s Impression, Sunrise.

This really resonated with me because I could see the similarities with the sunrise I had seen just an hour or so earlier. The flaming ball of red, casting red reflections onto the shimmering water.

That flaming ball of red is what I saw with my naked eye but as you can see in my shot above, the redness, because of the extreme heat and light of the sun becomes white in the camera.

This got me thinking and I looked back through my archive and found 45 images which I had tagged with the word sunrise. Clearly I’m not up so early very often. I do have a huge amount of images that aren’t tagged so this is just a sample. Then I looked for the tag sunset and now I found 226. Sunset is more of my thing!

As I looked through all of these, I found that a lot of them were taken at the time of sunrise or sunset but they didn’t actually show the sun. Of the few that did, the sun was mostly white or occasionally pale yellow. Absolutely none of them captured the actual sun as it looked to the human eye. So, then I thought I’d look at Adobe Stock photos with the search terms sunrise and sunset thinking that perhaps I’ve never tried hard enough or had good enough skills to capture it. I know that if I’m searching a stock photo site, their best images out of millions will be at the top of the results. Again, although they were excellent pictures, most of them showed a whiteness where the sun would be (except AI generated ones). Some of the photos showed a sunray effect using a narrow aperture and this sunburst effect depicted a sunrise well and it looked good but it’s mostly an artificial depiction created in camera.

So, next I wondered if I could work some Photoshop magic to recreate the flaming red ball and bring my image more in line with the painting. That’s just what I did, even copying Monet by digitally painting tiny red brushstrokes to enhance the reflections on the Thames. Here’s my best result for now, after quite a few hours of trial and error. I tried as much as possible to show the sun as the red ball (inspired by Monet) but to not take anything away from the London contemporary scene.

You can see Monet’s painting below. It’s in the permanent collection in the Musée Marmottan in Paris so that’s now on my list for when I visit next.

The HENI podcast covers the painting very interestingly and at length so if you’d like to see that (and I really recommend it) you can link to it here.

Finally, did I get the image I wanted from that morning? Yes I did. One of my shots became the third in my City of London series. Below are the three so far. They are -

City of London - Island

City of London - Bubble

City of London - Wave

I hope this gives you pause for thought.

I’ve spent a lot of time capturing the moon but usually I avoid the sun. For good reason! It can be dangerous for your eyes and your camera, especially if you use a telephoto lens and long exposure. For good photos of the sun you need a special solar filter. If you’re interested, the Royal Museums Greenwich site has some guidance. Right now I’m interested in just so many other things that I’ll give it a pass for the moment.

Loren x

When Painting Outshines Photography