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.