Morning has broken

A few of my favourite morning quotes:

I could be a morning person. If morning happened to be around noon.

My bed and I have a special relationship, we're perfect for each other. But my alarm clock just hates seeing us together.

Every morning I long to hold you, I need you, I want you, I love your warmth... your smell, your taste... Ohhh coffee I love you. Good Morning!

If people were meant to pop out of bed, we’d all sleep in toasters.

If you've followed for a little while you likely know that I wasn't cut out to be a morning person. I'm just not that productive in the morning. Oh, I'm not the surly kind but my internal clock seems to be a few hours out of sync with the early morning crowd's. Of which my wife is a devoted member.

She has told me on numerous occasions that I've missed a glorious sunrise. In fact, on several of those occasions she's even made some photos of the sunrise - in case I didn't believe her. A few mornings ago she told me of a beautiful huge moon that hung low over the horizon at the break of day (sorry, no photos). So I promised myself to go look the next day. No huge moon but I'll (grudgingly) admit that the light in the early morning was pretty nice. Hold the applause. Fear not - I doubt that early rising will become my new habit.

Looking on the bright side

"You know it's going to be a long day when you yell 'Seriously?!?' at your alarm clock." (author unknown)

Ah, the benefits of airline deregulation. When I was young, people flew at a decent time. But now, to get a good airfare, it's the early bird who catches the plane. And so the alarm clock rudely jolted us out of bed, prematurely, so we could get our daughters to the airport by 04:00 am (!!) for a 06:00 am flight. It was early, but on the bright side there was no traffic (everyone else had wisely chosen to stay in bed) - the usual 45 minute trip was done in under 25.

There was another bright side to this equation. I'm rarely up to witness a sunrise but since I'd already paid the price, I was treated to the following, which in my estimation was adequate compensation.

Osmosis

I was awakened prematurely this morning by my wife who told me that I had to get up and see a beautiful sunrise (thank goodness we're in the middle of the winter when the sun rises at what I consider to be a more 'normal' hour). As I jumped into my clothes she reminded me that I had requested her to wake me the next time there was a gorgeous sunrise. She had even brought the camera up with her.

I made some shots out of an upstairs window and then went down and stepped out onto the front porch, sans winter coat, into the -21C / -6F early morning. Within a few minutes I realized further shots would suffer from severe camera shake brought on by hypothermia. So inside I dashed for a coat and toque. I stayed out to get more shots until my fingers were so numb I couldn't operate the camera any longer.

I've never impressed on my wife any of the unwritten rules of photography e.g. carpe diem (see #2 here) but I think the 'learning by osmosis' concept has been at work in our home. She had already made a number of shots of the sunrise in its early stages whilst I was still lost somewhere in dreamland.

Here's a bit of the sequence we were privileged to witness and capture this morning. I hope your new year is off to a similarly auspicious start.

(if patience is truly a virtue then I'm in line to be a saint - this 'only' took 4 hours to post. Starting next week, I hope to be blogging at the speed of light, relatively speaking)

click on photos for a better view

Caught in the morning sun

"There is no hope for a civilization which starts each day to the sound of an alarm clock." (Author Unknown)

You might have guessed that I'm not a morning person. It's not that I don't like mornings - I do, very much - since I'm still up early most mornings and then go to bed. And this week I've even been getting up early to do some photo shoots. So this morning I found myself driving through the countryside looking sideways more than straight ahead. And since I had my camera with me anyway I could just stop in the middle of the road and capture a scene that I wouldn't normally be up to see.


Even though I have some (relatively) early morning work this week, I still subscribe to the wisdom in the quote above - my wife (definitely the early bird) wakes me up !


(10-22mm  f11.0  1/100 sec  ISO200)


click on photo to enlarge

(Day 297) Good morning Denver

Sometimes you just do what you have to do to meet the self-imposed obligations of doing a project 365, namely to make and post (at least) 1 photo each day for a whole year. I wasn't too sure what opportunities there might or might not be today as we had to leave our hotel early, return a rental car, and get to the airport for our early morning departure. With little time between our 2 flight segments, crossing 2 time zones and a 2-hour drive back from the airport, it was dark by the time we arrived home. Opportunities were about zilch, nada.

Anticipating that, I quickly stepped out onto the 12th floor balcony of our hotel at 06:30 a.m. and made a few photos of Denver's skyline. Needless to say, there wasn't much traffic.

(18-55mm  f7.1  1 sec  ISO800)