Sunrise/Sunset/Sky

Autumn Sunset

Here I am posting a second time today (and the third picture). I don’t generally get complaints about sunsets, though, so I’ll go ahead. Actually, sunsets seem to be my number two most popular subject after people and family members in particular. I guess I understand that. Sunsets are pretty amazing, in spite of how common they are. The happen often (well, technically they happen every evening, but they are not spectacular every evening). But they are fleeting and ephemeral and really are not captured in a photograph. We only love the photographs because they remind us of the real thing, which is so much better.

Trees By Moonlight

I didn’t have a lot of time to get out for picture taking today. After work I fixed myself dinner before heading off for a meeting. Because traffic is so unpredictable around here, I like to give myself extra time, particularly on some routes. That includes Muncaster Mill Road, which sometimes backs up terribly. Tonight it wasn’t so bad and I got where I was going a bit early.

The moon was out and shining through the trees where I parked and I thought I’d take a few pictures of that before going in. This one is a 6 second exposure at f/5.7, with a little extra light on the trees from my flashlight, which is a fairly bright LED model.

I also took a few pictures with the camera aimed straight up, showing stars and with the clouds blurring a bit due to the 30 second exposure, but those were not very good.

Sunset With Powerlines

I was driving over to Ben’s house this evening for a meeting. I had already taken a few pictures of my dinner. I know you all were hoping to see one of those, but as I turned off of Rt. 108 onto Fieldcrest Road, the sun was sinking into the west behind this line of power lines. I pulled off and took a dozen pictures of so. I don’t usually take industrial type pictures, although I also like them when I see them. This one turned out pretty well, though.

Evening Sky

I took a few pictures in the back yard this afternoon but I wasn’t very happy with them. I had sort of resigned myself to posting a picture that I wasn’t particularly excited about. At a little after 6:00 I went to a dinner engagement and as I parked, the sky to the west was starting to get a deeper shade of blue and the clouds were quite lovely. So, you get a reprieve from a boring picture and get a beautiful western autumn sky in early autumn, instead. You cannot tell from this picture but just below the image is interstate 270. Not particularly lovely, but the noise wasn’t enough to counteract the beauty above.

Lunar Eclipse

We were up bright and early this morning and got off by about 6:20. We made good time and didn’t have any real traffic issues all the way to Boston. We dropped Dorothy off at school and then returned later for Catacombs, a service held in the chapel on Sunday evenings. Before that started, though, we enjoyed the beginning of the lunar eclipse. I had brought my tripod but unfortunately, I had removed a piece from it to use with a flash bracket and had forgotten the bring that, so the tripod was basically useless (I couldn’t attach the camera to it). In consequence, this is hand held, and therefore not nearly as sharp as I would like. Still, it’s pretty clear that there is a shadow beginning to cover the moon.

I did get some pictures of the rust colored moon during the total phase, but they are less sharp even than this, requiring exposures of more than half a second or so. Not worth posting, I’m afraid.

Sunset

I’m still playing catch-up on my posts. This evening I was looking around for things to photograph. It was too dark to easily get pictures in the yard and I didn’t really have any ideas. Then, I was blessed with a subject that I didn’t have to go far to see.

The sun set into the west, as it tends to do, and the clouds lit up beautifully.

Morning Rainbow

About an hour after I got up, I noticed that the light out front was quite warm colored. That often means there is a good sunrise but when I looked out the color, while pretty, was fairly flat and not really suited for a picture. I happened to look out the kitchen window (which faces west south west), and not only was the color about the same but there was a rainbow going all the way across the sky. I woke Cathy and we both enjoyed it for about fifteen minutes and (surprise!) I took a few pictures. Rainbows are somewhat hard to photograph well. They generally aren’t as bright in the picture as they seemed in real life. Also, the surrounding scenery usually comes out darker than it really was. This one turned out reasonably well, though.

Sunset, Perquimans County, North Carolina

It was a long and hard week although I’m not going to go into details here. Those who know us know what happened. Anyway, this morning my mom and I drove down to North Carolina for a family reunion. It was a long day, especially considering we drove home again afterward but I’m ever so glad we went. After a week like this, being with family is as good as it gets. I took a few pictures during the reunion (and passed the 110,000 mark on this camera), but I decided that I’d post this picture, taken shortly after we left, instead.

Sunset

An obvious difficulty when taking a photograph that includes the sun is that it’s fairly bright. I mean, that’s pretty obvious, I guess, but what do you do about it. It isn’t just bright, it is very, very bright. If you shorten the exposure so that the sun doesn’t overwhelm the photograph, then the rest of the sky becomes very dark.

One obvious thing to do is wait for a sunset when the sun is rendered darker due to atmospheric conditions. At times like that, the number of stops between the brightness of the sun and the sky is reduced to a more manageable amount. Even so, there is still a difference. I confess to cheating a little for this image. In the original the sun is nearly pure white, still having been overexposed a bit. But I took various exposures, including one that is three f/stops darker (1/3200 of a second instead of 1/400). The sun you see in this image came from the darker image, while the rest is from the lighter. It works, though, because that’s actually the way our eyes see the scene, having more dynamic range than camera sensors.

Sunset Panorama

I hesitate to post another sunset but they seem to be popular. This one is a panorama made from three individual shots that I stitched together. They were taken in the horizontal aspect, where often I take a longer series of vertical shots. In this case the line of color was fairly narrow and with my 100mm lens, the shorter height of the images when horizontal was enough to get what I wanted. We were out in the upper part of the county for a birthday party for a friend when I noticed the color in the sky. I walked around to the front of the house and took these from the road, looking down the cul de sac to the west.

Covenant Village

Our youth retreat was at Covenant Village again this year. I really like it there, especially the quiet. It was 18°F this morning when I got up though, which is more like a winter retreat than a spring retreat. There were clouds moving across the sky all day and it was quite lovely. To the south from the main meeting room there is a hilltop field that you can see through the trees. I went out to take pictures and the sun was shining on that spot and it looked quite nice, I thought.

This is an HDR (High Dynamic Range) photograph, made from three images taken at different exposures and then combined into one image. This process allows you to capture detail in shadows that would otherwise be black while still getting highlight details that would normally go pure white. Sometimes it it overdone and way too obvious. For all I know, this is one of those times, but I think it’s a pretty picture, anyway.

Contrails

The sky was a beautiful blue this morning but was criscrossed with contrails from a bunch of jets, either coming to or leaving from one of the local airports. I don’t know where everyone is going but there were a lot this morning.

This is the view from our kitchen door at about 7:15 a.m. It made me want to travel. Just get on a plane and go anywhere. I’m not particular, I’d be happy to be anywhere else.

A Final (We Hope) Snowfall

The forecasters all got this one about right. It’s been relatively warm so it didn’t really stick to paved surfaces but the grass was covered and it was another beautiful morning. After the last snowfall and then the warmer weather, I think most folks around here were ready for winter to be over but we got this one, last dusting just to remind us that it can snow in the spring, as well. Because it didn’t affect traffic and I didn’t have to worry about shoveling the driveway, I was perfectly happy to enjoy this snowfall.

Another Sunset

It’s been feeling decidedly springlike for a little while now and with the period of daylight hours shifted to a bit later in the day, we had some time after work to go for a walk in the neighborhood. Of course I brought my camera, just in case, but I only took a handful of pictures. As we were heading back home, walking to the west, the sun was setting through the trees.

Sunset, Out Back

Are you getting tired of all these sunsets? I know they are beautiful, and all that, but is too much of a good thing a bad thing? If so, I can stop, or at least slow down a little. It does seem that they come in waves. We’ll have wonderful sunsets or beautiful sun rises for three or four days in a week, then we won’t have one again for a month. Not sure why that is. Still, I generally don’t complain when they come along. I quite like them, really. I opened the back door and took a bunch, including this one, this evening. While I was doing that, Cathy, who had stayed a bit late at work, called to say there was a great sunset. Yep, I noticed.

Sunset One, Looking Up

I wasn’t sure what I’d have a chance to get photographs of today. Cathy and I were heading from work out to Potomac because the president of Gordon College was in town and we had been invited to meet him, along with other prospective and potential students and their parents. It happened to be at the home of some friends of ours. We stopped at the library to return some books and I waited outside, enjoying the clouds, quickly moving across the sky.

When Cathy came back outside, we had about 45 minutes before we needed to be there and we didn’t fell like getting there early. So, we drove to MacArthur Boulevard and then down to Old Angler’s Inn and walked down to the C&O Canal. It was a bit muddy and we were not really dressed for hiking but we walked up the tow path a little way to a spot across from Sherwin Island. We watched the sun go down and light up the clouds.

Sunset Two, Looking Down

As we walked back, I kept turning around and taking pictures. As I crossed the bridge over the tow path, I took these two shots. the first of them, above, is (obviously) looking up through the trees to the west. The second, to the right, is looking down into the cold, still waters of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. I couldn’t decide which I liked better. I think they are both pretty nice, so, I’m posting them both.

If you know me, you’ll be surprised to learn that I didn’t take any pictures at the meeting with the folks from Gordon.

Another Foggy, Rainy Evening

Last Wednesday I posted a picture that turned out to be fairly popular, if the comments and “likes” on Instagram and Facebook are anything to go by. In that picture (see: Fog Amid The Trees, March 04, 2015) there was a beech tree against a backdrop of tree trunks. This evening is was actively raining, not just foggy, but the effect in the woods was very similar. Like last week, traffic was a bit slow in spots and as I waited to move I took a few pictures out the window. I don’t think this one is quite as good as last week’s and I really should know better than to try to reproduce something that’s already worked, but here you are.

Urban Sunset

I suppose technically this is a sub-urban sunset, as we were in the suburbs, but it’s certainly not a rural sunset. We were in Rockville, paying a visit to Second Story Books this afternoon. As we left the sun was sinking into the west (as it does most days) and the sky was turning orange. There was no way we were going to get somewhere wide open for a beautiful vista so we pulled into the parking lot of a local business establishment (Aladdin Carpet & Floors, to be precise), and I took a few pictures through the power lines and construction equipment across the street.

Sunset Over Safeway

As I was driving home today the eastern sky in front of me was quite beautiful with a line of clouds running almost due east-west straight ahead. I took a couple pictures of it as I was stopped in traffic. Then, I stopped at Safeway to pick up a few things. The western sky, over the top of the shopping center, only had a few small clouds but they were quite lovely. With my long lens and standing up on the side of my car to get a little higher up and over the foreground distractions, I was able to get this picture. By the time I got out of the store, not only was the sun down but all the clouds had moved off and the sky was a brilliant, deep, indigo blue.

Orion

It was pretty cool out when we got home late this evening. The wind was blowing and it was clear, with only a few clouds quickly moving across the sky. Orion was setting over our house and I got my tripod and went out to take some pictures. You can see his belt, the three stars Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka, running horizontally across the middle of the picture. The bright star at the top of this picture is Betelgeuse (Orion’s right shoulder). The star closest to our roof is Rigel. Other stars are Meissa, Bellatrix, and Saiph. Sirius in Canis Major, the brightest star in the night sky, is just over the top of the tree to the left in this picture.

Sunset

Shortly after we got home from Richmond yesterday there was a really nice sunset. Because I already posted three photos from Saturday and because sunsets aren’t terribly rare, I decided not to post any of them. Today the sunset wasn’t quite as spectacular but still pretty nice, so, today you get a sunset picture. That’s the way it goes.

Winter Sunrise

It was a bit chilly this morning, somewhere around 18°F At about 7:00 I noticed that there was a bit of color in the western sky. I grabbed my camera and then paused long enough to put on my shoes. I figured I might be out for a little while and under 20°F I usually wear shoes if I’m doing more than grabbing the mail. It was a wonderful sunrise, as you can see (this is to the east, of course). With the rain and snow we’ve been having it was very welcome.