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Well... at that time of the morning there really ought to be at least a coffee cart handy !!!

Thanks for letting me tag along Gerry and Rodney... it's always good to see how the masters work it.

Here are a few of my attempts...

These look a bit washed out (not on a calibrated monitor at the moment though). But otherwise they are pretty good to me.

Hi Mj - good to see you and your wife even (I don't know how you managed that) - I hope you both enjoyed the morning.

In these I reckon you've got a consistent cool/blue cast going on (which you may have intended) - this may also be contributing to the over exposed look I'm getting.

Compositionally I like your #2 - in fact giving that headland some breathing room on the left has merit - although you can't see as much of that stopper effect going on in the water and rocks below with the lip of the cliff at the bottom/front

#3 also is a nice compo - although maybe a touch too low with the lower part of the building merging with the distant land

Mj wrote:Well... at that time of the morning there really ought to be at least a coffee cart handy !!!

well we did get coffee afterwards..it just took a while

Mj wrote:Thanks for letting me tag along Gerry and Rodney...

glad you could come along

The images do have a very cool cast to them, however thats a easy fix in PP

I do prefer teh first two and I reckon you could improve teh composition with a little pano cropping, either crop for a classic thirds compo or.. actually, in both you need to keep the bottom half in, hence the only crop I reckon is from the top

Were you on AutoWB?

Yep... pretty much all the images need a large extra dose of warming up... I've quickly had a look at the bay shot and whilst I adjusted from about 4500 to 7500 and +10 tint it needed more like 14000 and +20 to get it about right.
In fact yes I had my cam on AutoWB... but then I had auto focus on initially too . Point of this exercise was always to get out and make all the mistakes... I like to think I can manage to only do them once
I'll need to do a bit of research to work out the right WB settings for the majority of cases... yesterday I just did some quick adjustments to get something up... as none of these are hanging material (well maybe hanging offenses) I'm not going to spend too much time with them.
One take away from yesterday was for me to get a nice pouch that I can use to lie the filter holder on while sorting out composition etc... I found it very useful to be able to remove the whole stack easily... but didn't have enough hands to hold everything.

Mj wrote:In fact yes I had my cam on AutoWB... but then I had auto focus on initially too
I'll need to do a bit of research to work out the right WB settings for the majority of cases...

It may be heresy but I almost always shoot on AutoWB (but in RAW). This whole debate about setting it in camera before shooting each light condition because it's quicker than doing it afterwards is frankly rubbish. In Lightroom I select the first image under consistent light and then shift click the last and then in the Develop module with Auto Sync turned on I edit the WB for the first image and the whole lot are automatically synchronised - done.

I think you need a judicious amount of
adjustment because all and every one
of the photos has potential.