2022 Apr 5 Tues, Mount Faber.
Camera: Nikon D7500.

The challenge with shooting sunrise is that you often get a nice sky but very dark subjects below. If you take pictures based on the reading of the sky, you will under-expose your subjects like buildings because the sky is more brightly lit than the ground. If you metered the buildings, then the sky will be over-exposed. As the sun rises above the horizon, there is absolutely no way you can get a balanced exposure not compromising one or the other. You can try using a graduated ND filter which can filter out some light in the top half. But it does not work for cityscape as you have a mixture of tall and short buildings.

Some of the pictures below were taken using HDR mode in Nikon D7500 camera. I tried exploring this for the first time and it certainly worked out very well in some of the images. In HDR mode, the camera takes two pictures with different exposure and merge the two pictures. You can see in this first picture below, where there were three birds that flew past. But because it is in HDR mode, you see 6 birds in the picture.

Pre-dawn at Mt Faber

I like the next 5 images. You can see the effect of HDR turns out quite well.

As the sun rises and the sky gain more light, the buildings become darker due to the wide dynamic range.

The picture below is also in HDR mode and the sky here is totally over exposed but I like the mood of this picture.

All the pictures here that are in HDR mode are not edited at all in Photoshop. That means there is no adjustment to any of the exposure whatsoever.