Four Sunrises
Welcome back! It’s a very short one this time. We had a few more days of peak fall colour and then the temperature dipped well below freezing for a night or two and it seems to have sucked the colour out of every leaf. The bugs are gone, and for some reason my eyes and ears haven’t adapted to the new conditions: I’m still looking for activity among the dried grasses, and puzzled at the general silence in the landscape, as if everything is looking north and holding its breath.
Thankfully, getting up for sunrise gets easier and easier, and I’ve been handed a few gems…though the jury is out as to whether those gem stones were properly polished and set.
First sunrise was a a red delight, and also a bit of a scramble: the clouds kept shifting and the red highlights kept moving around, so framing it properly around a foreground was a matter of frantically shuffling on my knees in the wet grass:
Then, the final weekend of peak autumn colour, we got a bit more mist. I caught this just as the sun lit the tops of the trees:
A bit later, after the sun had cleared the horizon, and the mist had cleared the fields, I found this lone sapling looking quite proud of itself:
Compositionally I’m a bit conflicted about the last one. It kind of violates a lot of “rules”, but more importantly it feels “off balance”. This is how I took it in the field, and I did it because I wanted to convey the great sense of “space” I felt, to really emphasize how it might feel to be this tree without friends or shelter. (It is also carefully arranged to avoid overlapping with any background elements, but those are technical considerations.) After playing around at home with it, I found this looks more “balanced”, though I’m not sure it conveys the sense of space I was after:
I think I still want to prefer the first one, as well as stamp my foot and say “I don’t care!” about the balance…but I do. I’d be curious to hear any thoughts 🙂
On to the third sunrise, which ended up being a show of texture rather than colour. Low clouds on the horizon prevented a fireworks display, but the high clouds radiated stripes. A couple of tall spruce soaked up any light and became silhouettes. For this I prefer black and white:
Later on the sun cleared the low clouds but was still grazing the treetops and casting long shadows:
This benefits from both a polarizer and a graduated filter to give more contrast the sky: your eye can compensate for how bright the sky is relative to the rest of the scene, but the camera kind of freaks out at the dynamic range, so it helps to take the edge off by using the appropriate filters.
Feel free to skip past this as I go on a little compositional rant:
…but I’m kind of please how this turned out (which is why it’s the title shot). I was, again, going for a sense of space, but in this case there was no immediate foreground interest. Instead, the space itself was the subject of interest. I chose a wide focal length, partly to push the horizon away, but also to include a bit of the tree next to me (top right) and the small bush (bottom left). In my mind these two elements provide important framing, even though they are very minor and I hope the viewer doesn’t look at them too much. The idea is they say “you are here” to the viewer, and maybe even, “this is how small you are” without really having to pay attention to them. The one debate about them I have is whether the tree branches are more a distraction than a frame, and if I should have made them more prominent…but my thought is that would give them too much emphasis. Moving on, the most important element is the tiny double-track path mid-left which gives the sense of scale. Without that it could be anywhere, at any scale.
Alright already, enough with that! Let’s cap this off.
For the final sunrise, I woke late, realized I couldn’t get to where I really wanted to be, and after a moment of thinking “how can I do this to myself … again?!”, also realized it might be a perfect opportunity to finally get a picture of the Winnipeg skyline, backlit by the sun. So I raced over to “garbage hill”, and old landfill-turned-doggy-park, and ran to the top. Breathless, I was treated to a safari-orange ball rising out of the haze:
Honestly, with colour like that, any row of buildings could have worked, and I can’t say the Winnipeg building geography contains much that is compelling, and yet…the Human Rights Museum spire is a bit unique, taking the centre line, and the one building crane implies activity, saying “yep, we’re busy here too”.
And that is it for now. I feel like a really learned a lot this summer, and my mind is still thinking of shots I’d like to plan for, but this is getting in the way of experiencing what actually is there in the moment. I need to remember that those conditions are not going to return for another year. I’ll have to write them down and dig them up later.
Our annual hiking trip is coming up. Last year’s hike involved a LOT of snow, any more of which might have caused a Donner party event…, but so far this year the weather seem pretty tame.
I said that just to jinx it… 😀
Cheers!
