I woke up at 0400 and was getting out of bed at 0445, unable to fall back asleep.
As I was reading about the previous day’s news, it occurred to me that – if the light were right – I might be able to catch a sunrise image at a location that I have always wanted to photograph when the conditions were right.
I drive past the location everyday that I commute to work and know that the sun is near the right spot if the conditions are right, so I looked at the sunrise forecast. It was promising, so decided to put on my long-johns, grabbed my gear, and made my way to the nearest parking lot to the highway: the 481 sports complex.
When I left the house, I had intentions of driving right up to the spot that I was going to photograph from, but then I thought better of it. Even though I would be parking on the shoulder at 0630 on a Saturday morning, it was at a merge onto a 65 mph interstate, and I thought it would be wiser to park off the highway and walk the on-ramp on the safe side of the guard rails until I reached my desired spot. This decision, of course, added more overall travel time than I had initially anticipated when I left the house 20 minutes earlier.
After an extra 15-20 minutes of walking than I had planned for, the light was already at peak when I arrived and I hurriedly tried to compose an image only to discover that what I see from the road everyday is not what I was seeing from the ditch. When seated from the car, travelling at 50 mph as I gain access to the highway, there appears to be separation between element that was apparent when I was standing at the scene and the composition suffers for it.
Color cast in the mid-to foreground to match hue in the sky
And then there is my inability to successfully process/merge scenes with high dynamic ranges. I made a concerted effort to capture exposure bracketed images, a high-resolution image, and an in-camera HDR in hopes of getting something that I could work with. So even though the composition isn’t outstanding, the image still provides me with a opportunity to figure out how to massage an image such as this one to maximize the potential of a similar image when the brightest section of the sky is saturated but I still want/need to extract details from the shadows. And then there is the colorcast: it needs one, but I am still trying to figure out how to make that look best.
Blue color cast in the mid-to-foreground
This, I wager, is what differentiates an artist from a technician.