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01/04/2002 Entry: "photographing the light"
Being a heavy sleeper, kitchen timers are all that get me up these days, and the one next to my bed started buzzing at 4:45 AM.
I sat up, realized how tired I was, and weighed getting up and driving an hour down to the shore to photograph the sunrise versus sleeping for another five hours. As obvious as it sounds, it struck me as a relatively new insight that the sunrise wasn't going to wait for me to take the photographs. It was up to me to get my tired self out of bed and get to the location in time, and that's what I did.
I arrived just as the sky began lightening from black to a pale blue-grey. The best colors of a sunrise often happen before the sun actually hits the horizon, and that was how it was this morning. The horizon had a thin line of clouds that blurred where the ocean met the sky, though the rest of the sky was completely clear. First these clouds were nearly black, backlit by the rising orange light from the sun. This light then formed a rainbow of colors, as the sky went from orange to yellow to blue.
I began taking some long exposures with the moving ocean in the foreground and the horizon at about 1/4 of the way from the top of the frame. It was cold, about 23 degrees and lots of wind coming off the water. The metal tripod froze my fingers every time I lifted it up to move to a different position.
As the sun got nearer to the horizon, the glow reached the wet sand that the waves were washing over and reflected a blue orange in the rippled patterns.
A couple of days ago I read "Good photographers photograph the scene, great photographers photograph the light." I'm not anywhere near a great photographer, but as I knelt in the wet sand and felt the water soak through to my knees, I began trying to see the patterns of light and composing them as the elements in the picture as opposed to looking at the sand, water and sky.
The line of clouds still stretched across the horizon, and as the sun finally began to rise, its light gave the clouds an brilliant orange lining. By then the light on the water and in the sky had gotten much less interesting, just light pastelly colors. The sun hit the beach and the houses and poured on the morning glow that made the sand shine and warmed up the brown fencing that supported the sand dunes.
Four rolls of film and I was done. It was getting warmer and I was able to unclench my hands that were basically stuck in place on the camera.
When I'm done taking pictures, I usually leave feeling a little let down and mulling over what pictures I could've made that I didn't. I know these feelings aren't worth much, and I'm glad I got up. Today feels half over and it's only 11AM and I got to take pictures of a amazing sunrise.
I left, shaking with cold, knees wet from kneeling in the sand, and excitement about how the shots will turn out. Pictures soon.
Replies: [C.2]
Thanks Jason, I'm hoping the pictures will match what I saw this morning, I should have them back in about a week.
Posted by steve @ 01/04/2002 10:29 PM PST
that was amazingly vivid... half of me wants to see the pictures and half of me doesn't want to see them for fear of changing the image your description conjured up in my head. It sounded like a story well suited for the experiences page...
Posted by jason s @ 01/04/2002 05:00 PM PST
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