Posts in Category: dawn
12/11/2011: Dawn Church, Happy Sunday
Coming out of the hotel to catch the shuttle to Wildcater Ranch one morning last week in Graham Texas, I looked to the east and was taken with the dawn light behind this lighted steeple, and with the silhouettes of the trees. I framed it several different ways, but this was the keeper.
Canon SX40HS at 250mm equivalent field of view, f5 @ 1/40th @ ISO 800. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity and Sharpness.
And for the Sunday thought: Photography is all about catching the play of light and shadow. Note that it is not “light and darkness”…it is definitely light and shadow. We are creatures of light. Light is our reality. Darkness is simply the absence of light. It has no substance of its own, and it always flees at the first hint of light. Every photograph is a record of the light that stuck the film or the sensor…producing a chemical change or a charge that is then rendered into an image of reality. Shadow is only the record of where the light did not reach.
Or taking a word from another tradition: “The light of the world has come into the world, and it utterly defeats the darkness.” That is the promise and that is the reality we celebrate this season. So happy Sunday…and an early Merry Christmas, from a dawn in Graham Texas.
11/27/2011: First Sun at Bosque del Apache, Happy Sunday
This is another shot from the delayed sunrise last Sunday at Bosque del Apache. Clouds closed the eastern horizon and it took the sun an hour or more to make its way up behind them before there was any direct sun on the ponds and fields. While the Geese were up and away at first light, many of the Cranes remained in the overnight ponds well past their normal departure for the feeding fields. The combination of subtle indirect light with a touch of dawn color made the morning unique.
Canon SX40HS. 1) 107mm equivalent, f4.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 200. 2) 246mm equivalent, f5 @ 1/250 @ ISO 200. 3) 717mm equivalent, f5.8 @ 1/200th @ ISO 125. Programed Auto with iContrast. –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for Intensity, light balance, and Sharpness.
And for the Sunday thought: Too often we think that clouds on the horizon spoil the dawn…and they certainly mute the sunrise and delay full light…but there is a beauty in that more subtle light, and you have much longer to appreciate it…to study the effect…to absorb the wonder of it. This is good, or can be if we we can see the delay for what it is and let go of our impatience. Taking it as a metaphor, of course, clouds on the horizon delaying our dawns are all too common in our lives…both our worldly lives and our spiritual lives (for those still making that distinction). When we commit to living with eyes wide open and full of wonder, we let go of our expectations of speedy dawns every day…we commit to giving the sun time to climb up behind the clouds, and we commit to enjoying every moment of the wait. In fact, we commit to not waiting at all. We commit to being in the moment and appreciating each one for what it is. That’s not waiting for anything. That is the life of the creator in us through spirit of his son, enabling us to be as we are intended to be. A long slow dawn, below the mountains, with majestic birds walking on reflected light…makes it easy to be wide eyed in wonder and belief…but that’s call for each day…no matter what shape the dawn takes.
Now if I could only remember that!
5/1/2011: Sun-rise with Moon and Venus
Happy Sunday!
The sun is just a promise in this dawn shot from the balcony of my hotel room in Crescent Beach Florida where I am working the FL Birding and Photo Fest…but it is a promise that will surely be kept! I was up early to lead a bird walk at Vaill Point Sanctuary (6 species of warblers, Great Crested Flycatcher, Great Blue Heron rookery, Carolina Wren, Bald Eagle, about 60 Cardinals, several Plain Titmice, and, best and last bird…Barred Owl).
Such a dawn sky, decorated with a sickle moon and the bright chip of the planet Venus, is an inspiration in itself, and I could not resist taking a few moments out of my field trip preparations to attempt to capture it.
The Nikon Coolpix P500 has an interesting feature set, which includes Night Landscape mode. The camera takes a series of very rapid exposures and stacks them to increase sharpness, reduce noise, and record night and, as in this case, dawn colors naturally. Generally I am not a fan of such fancy in-camera processing (trickery?…maybe because it generally does not work well), but I have been pleasantly surprised by the effects the Nikon manages. This shot still needed some noise reduction, but it is about as faithful a representation of the dawn as I saw it as one could hope for. And, it would have taken some trickery indeed to capture the image by any other method. I took traditional long exposure comparison shots, and they simply do not compare.
Zoomed in to 84mm equivalent field of view to frame the moon and Venus over the horizon. Nominal exposure as recorded in the exif data, f4.4 @ 1/25th @ ISO 560. I used the balcony rail to steady the camera, with my hand between rail and camera. The in-camera image stabilization helped too.
Processed in Lightroom…primarily for noise.
So, for a Sunday, I am thinking about the role of modern technology in my life…whether it is the programmed image stacking routine inside a camera, or this laptop, or the internet tablet I use to show others these shots, or the whole internet cloud, where this will be posted and were my images are stored. I could live with out all of it, and sometimes, to be honest, it seems a distraction from really living at all…until a dawn like this one…when it all comes together to allow a moment I treasured to be captured and rendered so that I can share it will all of you. And then I think of modern technology as a miracle…oh, not in the sense that phrase is generally used of something we do not understand and can barely believe…where miracle merely stands in for magic…but in a sense of gratitude for all the minds (and spirits) who have labored to create the possibility that I might catch and share such a moment. I see the blessing in tools we have today. I hope that what I do with them honors the creator of the world, the minds, and the miracle…and that these images are a blessing to you.