Tips for beach sunrise

Going to the jersey shore this coming saturday for 8 days. Im off from work for nearly 16 straight days starting monday morning. I plan on using my xt and tokina 12-24 and maybe the 24-205 f/4L. Should I use a cpl this early in the morning? How bad does a sunrise look when you shoot with a long exposure? I was thinking about going just before the the sun actually peaks above the horizon and using a long shutter.

Can anyone give some tips for sunrise pics? This is the first time i'll be doing anything like this.

Be sure to use a tripod and if you can get a boat in the frame it will add some intrest to the shot. You may not neet the CLP but if you do use one, remember you willl lose at least 1 to 1.5 stops. Do not include the sun when you meter the scene. Meter then recompose.

Do you have any Graduated Neutral Density filters because you will need them for the sky OR you will need to create two seperate exposures, one for the ground and one for the sky and then blend them in Photoshop.

The sky will be too bright for the foreground and so you want to hold back the exposure for the sky. Basically, try this at home before you go:

At sunrise or sunset, in AV mode, meter for the ground only and set the correct shutter speed (use F11 for aperture). Now take a shot with 50% ground and 50% sky. You'll notice that the sky blows out.

This thread may help :

https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=315987

Also, take a look in the Travel and Landscapes forum for some awesome recent Bahama threads by jdizzle. A GND was used for all those shots.

gotta make sure i take the laptop with me on saturday so i can go back and look at this thread when i attempt the sunrise. Completely forgot about this thread.

If you shoot long before the sun comes up, you can usually get great color in the sky, and possible a decent foreground. Once the sun gets near the horizon, you gotta move fast, try bracketing with wide exposure to get a decent sky and foreground, then try an HDR merge. Working on some sunset HDR stuff this weekend.