Hello everyone!
I hope you’re all having a good start to the week, wherever this post happens to find you. I actually have a few more night images to share with you, but frankly after all the rain we’ve had over the last several weeks and now with the self-quarantining happening resulting in people being stuck inside and isolated, I thought I’d change gears a bit and share some colorful, more cheerful images for several weeks. I, for one, can feel the strain of the “winter blahs” and am longing for some sunny days (my recent trip to India helped with this as well! – ah, sunshine!), so even though this image “feels” cold, perhaps we can bask in the sun light together for a moment!
Several weeks back, we were blessed with crystal clear skies that coincided with the new moon, so some friends and I ventured out in the early morning to take pictures of the Milky Way. It was a wonderful time of fellowship and photography, and an interesting exercise to boot! My friend Daniel has picked up film cameras again and has been exploring the craft of photography in a manner in which most of us have long forgotten (you can check out his work on Instagram here). Well, we thought it would be entertaining and challenging to try to capture the Milky Way on film – and we were successful, by the way – and was a fun pursuit. Hopefully we’ll get to try again some time in the future! In any case, generally when it’s crystal clear for the night sky, there’s no reason to hang around for sunrise because… well… there are no clouds in the sky to catch color, and bare blue skies are generally not terribly interesting from a photography standpoint. We all packed up as the day moved into blue hour, and headed back over the mountain.
As luck would have it on this morning, however, the fog was wispy and there was lots of frost in the trees, so as the sun’s rays started to poke above the mountains, some interesting light appeared. I was seeing all this play out as I drove up the Foothills Parkways, and so pulled over at the first chance I had, so that I could setup shop again. Glad I did! The first images almost looked just blue and white, but then as the sun popped above the mountains, a burst of warm light shown through into the valleys, creating the scene you see above. I was attracted to the scene because everywhere the sun hit, the light was warm and inviting, however the shadows still looked very cold and forbidding. Contrast in light, color, and emotion. I guess the moral of the story is, every sunrise has a story to tell, even if it’s not an explosion of color in the sky. 🙂 That’ll be next week.
Have a great week!
–Dan Thompson