Kuala Lumpur has been hit by seasonal haze since a week ago. This is usually bad news for us landscape and cityscape photographers. But instead of putting our cameras back into drybox, we can actually make use of the haze to act as a “ND filter” or somewhat to block intense white light from the sun.
So happen that I stay in a high-rise building that faces the iconic Merdeka 118 Tower in the sunrise and guess what… wouldn’t it be nice to shoot the sun rising on the tip Merdeka 118 Tower? Imagine, it’s like the tip of the tower poking the almighty sun like a pin needle poking a floating balloon. Well, all in, it took me 5 days to get it right.
Here’s day 1. The sun was still pretty far off to the right of the tower. Good weather, but the positioning of the sun was off by quite a lot.
On day 2, the sun was getting closer to the tower. But the weather was quite bad. Thick clouds were looming around the horizon and I could not see the sun rising. I only manage to get the sun rising from those thick clouds but by then, the sun was already pretty high up from the horizon.
On day 3 was the worst… the weather was too cloudy that I gave up and did not even shoot a single photo. Basically, there was no sunrise that day.
Came day 4, the weather was back to being good. The sun was very close to the center of the tower… but still a bit off. Here’s the photo below, you can see how close it came to be at the center.
And finally, came day 5… which is today. Boy oh boy, the sun just perfectly rose in the center of the tower. Finally, I got the shot… after trying for 5 mornings consecutively. Here’s the final result below.
Of course, it did not end there. I waited a few more minutes for the sun to rise slightly higher to a point where the tip of the tower and the sun was just slightly touching each other… and snapped the shot. Here’s the photo below.
