Dawn: Turning one Thing into Another

In the last post, I mentioned the inspiration given me by a certain yellow and purple bathroom corner.

One of these days I will go back in the archives to find that first group of bathroom-corner photos. Since I’m too lazy to do that right now, and since we had a beautiful dawn a few mornings ago, a dawn which yielded some interesting abstracts-and-motion photos, we’ll stay in the recent past for this post. All photographs were taken from the front door area of the house, to be precise — within one foot of the northernmost porchpost. Here’s proof that you don’t have to go far to make pictures.

Dawn comes, as does the road to the house, up through a shallow east-facing valley, which slopes down to meet the Tiasquam River.

Twenty minutes before sunrise.

The valley contains brush: clethra, viburnum, and blueberry, and trees: mostly swamp maple, oak and beetlebung.

Fifteen minutes before sunrise.

The view is obscured plant growth, but when the trees are bare, in winter, you can discern the exact moment when the sun passes over the horizon.

If you’ll open the front door, light floods into the house.

When there is a deck of clouds at dawn, there are a few moments when the sun lights up the undersides of the clouds.

These brief times, these ecstatic and ephemeral bursts of color, occur also during certain sunsets.

Sun underlights the clouds. Ten minutes before dawn.

OK.

Move the camera in a slight arc from left to right.

One third of a second exposure.

Seven minutes before dawn.

Turn the camera around the lens’s axis.

One half second.

Fifteen minutes before dawn. The large black oak, silhouetted here, lost its top during Hurricane Bob of 1991.

Rotate the camera again.

Another half second.

It’s still fifteen minutes before dawn.

Turn again.

Another half second.

Seven minutes before dawn.

Dawn turns to sunrise.

One fifteenth of a second of sunrise.

 

With randomish shaking, the lens makes a sunrise salute.

One second of sunrise.

The penultimate one-second exposure.

 

And here,  the last one-second’s-worth….

 

Thanks for taking this look at a Tiasquam sunrise.