The Sun never appeared

But it didn't mean it wasn't a good dawn. This was taken at 7:52 am, 14 minutes before sunrise. This was the height of the sky's colour, caused by the underlighting of the clouds by rays of sunlight travelling through the earth's atmosphere from below the horizon.

I've photographed this tree many times; sometimes options are limited and you need to be in position to take shots quickly. As it was I had to park up and run along a footpath to get in position for the shot. This light barely lasted 10 minutes. I originally wanted to get a compressed shot of the trees and hedges in the horizon, but despite the interesting tree shapes those images didn't have the oomph of this lone tree.

I used a 3 stop ND grad to control the sunlight and was able to bring back some detail in the tree using the basic sliders in Lightroom.