Sunrise at Kastellholmen
Two and a half years ago I went to photograph the Gröna Lund amusement park from Kastellholmen. Back then, it was in the middle of winter, and the sky was a dark background with the neon lights of the park in front of them. With the bright nights we have here in Stockholm during summer I thought I'd see what the park looked like with a much brighter background.
A nighttime excursion resulted in photos that were "just about average". Not ugly, but nothing I think really improved on the old photos. Chiefly, it was the flat dark blue sky that was boring. Now, there are two blue hours during a day - one right after sunset, and one right before sunrise. Since the sun sets in the north-west, and Gröna Lund is due East from Kastellholmen, the sunset blue hour makes for boring photos. But the sunrise hour showed promise, and I decided to get there an hour before sunrise to, in the words of Art Lebedev, "add some red" to the sky behind the park.
Sunrise was at 0421, which put the blue hour between 0321 and 0421. With some margin (and because I still wanted the sky to be dark), I wanted to start shooting at about 0300 and end at about 0400, which meant getting up at 0230, grabbing the photo kit and setting out for Kastellholmen. Which I did. This is what I saw when I got there.
