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.