Posts in Category: sunrise
Sunrise of over Long Island
It was late in the day yesterday before I realized that it was not, in fact, Wednesday…certainly long after I posted my Pic 4 Today in the #wildlifewednesday category on Google+ 🙂 So it is not surprising that I also remembered, about the same time, that I had a few shots form my last day on Long Island still on the camera and unprocessed. They were more out the window of the hotel shots, this time of the sunrise. This shot is a lot more Processed than usual…approaching overcooked, but, as an image I think it holds some interest.
Samsung Smart Camera WB800F in Rich Tone mode. Processed in Snapseed, using the new HDR Scene filter, on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
Dawn on the Prairie
Just a quick post from the first field trip of the Potholes and Prairies Birding Festival. Samsung Galaxy S4 in HDR Mode. Processed in PicSay Pro on the phone.
Winter Again
Winter storm Nemo dropped 29 inches of snow on us two weekends ago. Last weekend we got another 6-8 from an unnamed storm. Yesterday we got maybe 8-10 inches from the remnants of winter storm G, which raged across the mid-west before it got to us. G is the first of them to create classic winter scenes though. Wetter, clinging snow and little to no wind allowed snow to build up on any remotely horizontal surface. The clothes-line is 3 inches tall this morning. This image is from sunrise today.
Canon SX50HS. In-camera HDR. Recorded exif: f4 @ 1/320th @ ISO 80. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, sharpness, and color temperature.
Blackpoint Drive Dawn: Happy Sunday!
Okay. We have 5 foot drifts of snow in the yard, the shoveled pile at the end of the drive is over 7 feet tall (thank you Nemo), and it is –2 degrees on the thermometer. It is a good morning to skip back, at least in spirit, two Sundays to this “chilly” dawn on Blackpoint Drive at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. They are promising that it will warm up into the 30s in Southern Maine today, with clear sky and lots of sunshine, so tomorrow you will very likely see a winter snow scene here. But for today, let us remember warmer times and warmer places 
This was one of those dawns when the sun kissed the mists over the marsh, and, in a few more moments after this shot, turned the grasses gold. This is the spot where the flock of Ibis flew in to join the egrets feeding (Ibises in the Dawn), where the Snowy perched in a tree against the gold (Google+)…this is the place where the Wood Stork settled and posed against the warm light (Woodie!). It is hard, in our culture, to avoid using the word “magical” to describe such an experience…except that magic has no place in my chosen view of the world. It was a blessed dawn. It was dawn full of grace and wonder. It was an awesome dawn in every sense.
Technically, to capture just a glimmer of that wonder, I shot this image using In-camera HDR Mode, with the Canon SX50HS on my little Fat Gecko shock-cord carbon fiber tripod. There was a Refuge sign on the right that stuck into the frame, and a bit of the gravel and sand of the pull-out showing in the bottom right corner. I used the clone tool in PhotoShop Elements 11 to paint out the sign and fill in the gravel, and cropped and processed the image for full effect in Lightroom.
And for me, veering off into the technical this way does not diminish the wonder of the experience at all. I am truly thankful, and can even spare a little awe , for the engineers and image scientists at Canon who make a shot like this relatively easy with today’s best Point and Shoot cameras. I even give thanks for the Fat Gecko tripod, which I take places like this where I would not pack a “real” tripod. And, of course, the folks at Adobe who work on PhotoShop Elements and Lightroom deserve a huge measure of gratitude. They are so much a part of my creative process that I find it hard to imagine working without them. Even my Toshiba Ultrabook is essential to the experience. Finally, there is this medium…the internet, Facebook, Google+, WordPress, all working together to allow me to share the experience with you.
And it all comes together in the image…or rather in the experience of creating the image…in responding to the dawn by attempting to catch what I can of it, and of sharing it with you.
So there is no specific Sunday Thought today. Just the image and the experience, from seeing to capture to processing to sharing. There is the wonder. There is awesomness shot all through, like the light of dawn kissing the marsh and turning it to gold.
Ibises in the Dawn
Five white Ibises and a Glossy coming in to land just after dawn at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. I had to look up the plural of Ibis. Turns out that in the vernacular the members of group of individual Ibis are Ibises. The group that includes all Ibises is, however, more properly Ibides or Ibide. Such is the mess that is our Latinized Anglo Saxon French hodgepodge of a language. 
White Ibises are common on the Refuge in January, but, until I looked closely at this image, I would have told you I had not seen a Glossy on this trip.
This is an example of how fast and flexible the Canon SX50HS is. I was taking sunrise pics of the waders in a small channel at Stop 2 on Blackpoint Wildlife Drive when I saw a group of birds coming in. I spun the control dial to Sports Mode, backed off on the zoom for framing, got focus on them, and got off a burst of shots as they passed close. Not bad! You can see the far out-of-focus shadows of a foreground palm they were about to fly behind on the left side of the frame.
Canon SX50HS as above. 655mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 500. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. Cropped slightly on the right to eliminate random bird wings.
Titusville Sunrise with Palms: Happy Sunday!
Every year when I visit the Space Coast Birding Festival, I stay at the Quality Inn on Rt. 50, and almost every year I take some version of this view. It is looking from the second floor balcony to the east, out over I95, toward Cape Canaveral and the Atlantic. There seem to be a fair number of dawns like this (at least one a visit so far)…with low lying fog cloaking the trees, and clouds catching the gold of the rising sun over the horizon.
The images have changed over the years, as camera technology has improved. On my first visits, the palms in the foreground were stark black silhouettes, with no detail. This shot is the Canon SX50HS’ Hand-held Night Scene Mode, which uses three stacked exposures to reduce noise and process out camera motion. I find that, with some additional processing in Lightroom, it also produces relatively natural sunrises and sunsets…certainly with more foreground color than a normal exposure…while maintaining the intensity of the sky.
Recorded exif: 130mm equivalent field of view. f5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday Thought. It happens that this was taken on the very last day of my Florida trip, on the morning when I was packing up for the drive to the airport and the flights home. I was on my way back from breakfast, without my camera, of course, enjoying the dawn, when I realized that I had not taken this picture this trip. I went back to my room, got my camera, and hustled back down the balcony to find a shot between the pillars, before the sun broke the horizon and the colors faded away. To me this image is full of peace, promise, and potential. In fact, it works, for me, because of the tension between the peace and the potential. It is, as every sunrise is, a still point, a dynamic point of balance, between the rest of night and the bustle of day. I am very glad to have stopped to catch it, but it would have been enough just to stop…to stand a breathe and feel the world tip over into day.
I hope, on my spiritual journey, to learn to live at that still point…at the point of tension…of perfect balance between peace and action, where all things are possible, and many are likely! I like this image because whenever I look at it it takes me back to that time and place. I hope to learn to be as sure of where that place is in me as I am that, if I spend a week in Titusville, I will find this view. And I would like to be able to step back there whenever I needed, any time of day, and any place.
Woodie!
On Sunday morning I was at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge for sunrise. I stopped at the 2nd numbered pull-out on Blackpoint Wildlife Drive for pics of the sunrise itself. There were two birds there…a Great Egret and a Tricolored Heron, both of which apparently frequent the small pools below the pull-out this year as I have seen both there on just about every trip around Black Point Drive. This time however, in the space of 20 minutes as I watched the sunrise, well over a hundred birds flew in to share those small pools. Most were White Ibis, but there were also many Snowy Egrets, a few more Great Egrets, a few more Tricolored Herons, and one Wood Stork.
I had lots of fun playing with the dawn light and the various birds as they feed in the pools below me. This is about as “handsome” a shot of a Wood Stork as you are going to find. The soft golden light of the dawn brings out all the character of the bird. Though Woodie in this image looks nicely posed and sedate…it was actually feeding rapidly and moving all the time. I had to catch it in this pose.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/320th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Happy New Year! Dawn 2013
I planned on posting a dawn shot, out the back door, over the back yards, to celebrate the first sunrise of 2013, but I had given up on the sunrise and started another post. It looked to me like the sun had snuck up behind a cloud bank and I was going to have to post something else. Mid-post I happened to look up and, low and behold, there was the sunrise I had hoped for! Oh me of little faith.
So, I was writing about how my artistic intent for this year is to 1) be there, 2) be aware so I can see any possible image, 3) be ready (skills honed and gear mastered). And then to frame, capture, and share what I see. That’s it. That will be my photographic goal for 2013 as it has been for many years now. I am looking forward to it!
So, the dawn. Still in my bathrobe, I cracked the sliding glass door that opens on the back deck (it is cold out there) and framed shots as the colors came up in the clouds. Open door. Shoot. Close door. Wait. Open door, etc. When the sunrise had reached what I judged to be its peak, I shot two last frames to form a panorama. The panorama above. (click on it to open it full width in the lightbox)
Fine. Then I get the images into Lightroom and open them out into PhotoShop Elements. I just installed PE 11 last week. Where did they put the PhotoMerge tools?? It took me 10 minuets of searching the help files to find the new placement. Then when I got the images into PhotoMerge’s Panorama tool, I realized that (once again!) I had tipped the camera up to frame the sunrise, and forgot that the distorted perspective would wreck havoc with any panorama attempt. There was just no way these two images were going together smoothly. Rats! Not doing so well my statement of artistic intent so far.
But then, in preparing the other images for my gallery I tried adjusting perspective in Lightroom. Ah ha! What if I adjusted perspective on the two panorama pics before exporting them to PE? No sooner thought than done, and, hey presto, PE’s PhotoMerge Panorama tool was able to do the rest!
So, here it is. Happy New Year. Dawn 2013. And I will have to amend my statement of artistic intent to include whatever learning is needed to accomplish it. But that is okay. I like to learn.
Canon SX50HS in Hand-held Night Scene Mode. 2 images stitched in PE’s PhotoMerge tool. f3.4 @ 1/400th @ ISO 800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Happy New Year to you all. And may you all fulfill your own artistic intent this year and every year.
Sandhills in Silhouette: Bosque del Apache
One of the reasons you get up before dawn and go stand in the cold by some patch of water at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge…or at the other end of the day, stand in the same spot on feet that are way too tired, ignoring the urgent summons to supper your tummy is broadcasting…is the silhouettes of the Cranes against the early or late day sky. Cranes in flight at any time are a primal, almost a prehistoric site, and when reduced to their most basic and cast against a sky in various shades of sunrise or sunset, they speak directly to the layer of the mind that is under the civilized and the socialized. There is something attractively wild, primeval, in a Crane in silhouette. (Do click these first two images to see them as large as your monitor or screen will allow.)
This year, with my new Canon SX50HS, I was able to catch the best Bosque silhouettes of my photographic life so far…and even some semi-silhouettes that still hold detail in the cranes like the dawn shot above.
The first image is three shots of the same Crane as I panned with it in Sports Mode at 5 frames per second. After trying a triptych, which did not quite work, I used PhotoShop Element’s PhotoMerge tool in Panorama Mode to hand place and blend the images at the edges…and then evened the exposure even more using the dodge tool. The rest are just straight Sports Mode shots processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. The next to last one is cropped at the left to eliminate a half bird.
Bosque Dawn 2: Happy Sunday!
On Saturday at the Festival of the Cranes I woke myself up early, grabbed a shower and a banana from the breakfast buffet at the hotel, and made the 25 mile drive out to Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge to be there well before dawn. When I made the dawn run on Thursday, I had been just slightly too late, and I had driven all the way in to the Flight Deck on the main pond at Bosque. I almost missed the rising of the Snow Geese who, that morning and in that place, were up and in the air a good ten minutes before the sun touched the horizon. I did not want to be late again…so I left earlier and I did not go so far into the Refuge.
I stopped at the newer ponds along NM 1, just inside the refuge. Good thing. The parking lots were already about full, and close to two hundred people lined the service road that boarders the ponds…many of them with their 600mm Canon lenses on big tripods, and at least one other camera body with a shorter lens for flight shots, but just as many with no camera at all…or with only a phone camera. I know why the big lens guys (and girls) are there, but I am always impressed that normal citizens, with no photographic imperative (or only so much as a phone camera indicates) will leave warm beds, bundle up, and drive out to shiver in the dawn to catch the rise of the geese and cranes.
I am impressed by the numbers, but I totally understand the motivation. Anyone who has ever seen the geese and cranes rise at dawn once will be indelibly marked with the desire to see it again. And anyone who has heard a friend or relative describe the experience…who has witnessed the glow in the eyes and the grin that cover the inadequate, stumbling words of the description (which often amounts to no more that “you just gotta see it!”)…will have reason for enough curiosity (if they are alive at all to nature) to want to see it for themselves. Some of these people have driven down from Albuquerque this Saturday morning, getting up at 3 am to arrive and stand beside me on this patch of dirt road beside the shallow flooded field ponds. Some of the big lens crowd have traveled (as I have) across the breath or depth of the USA to be there.
Wherever we come from, we share the anticipation, the eager excitement, as we wait for dawn. Myself, I can not resist running out to the edge of the road on the other side of the parking lot to catch a few shots of the sky as the sun rises, though I know each time I do that I might have my back turned when the geese rise.
Or I turn to watch the color come into the southern sky over the mountains and the cars in the parking lot.
The geese are late this morning. Something in the air is holding them on the ponds well past the real dawn on the opposite horizon. We are getting cold now.
And then it happens, without any warning beyond a sudden increase in the volume of the constant chorus of geese honks and cackles, and prehistoric voices of the cranes…woosh…and the air of full of gyring bodies, beating wings, and ashudder with the cries of the geese and the alram of the cranes. Only the geese come up off the water. The cranes are made of sterner stuff, and besides, lack the ability to leap direct into the air…they need a runway to get airborne…but the geese are enough.
In the half-light of the dawn my camera strains to catch more than a blur in the mass of geese. They spiral up and out…not a normal panic this, where the geese will settle back in the same pond or field after something puts them up…but a mass movement of geese to their daytime feeding grounds. They circle overhead, the flock stretching out and branching off as they form into different curving lines and head for the horizons across the delicate tints of the dawn to find some farm field full of unharvested grain…or some newly flooded crop field on the refuge.
And by now the sun is up, though still hidden behind clouds, and the last tints are fading to gold in the east. Over there the air is still full of the birds that have come up off the Flight Deck Pond, to far away for more than silhouettes and a benediction on the last of dawn.
Happy Sunday!