Sunrise - March 15, 2011

I'd booked the day off work to volunteer at Conor's school field trip to Fort Calgary but that wasn't happening until later in the morning so I thought I'd go out and see what the sunrise was going to do. With daylight savings time in effect the sunrise is suppose to happen around 8:00am or so.   I left the house around 7:30 and started driving out east of the city again.

 I stopped the car on Garden Road near Conrich and got out the tripod and cable release. The sky was on fire I wanted to compress the line of telephone poles and fill the frame with the colour on the horizon so I used my 300mm lens. Using a long focal length, the camera is susceptible to any kind of motion so the tripod was necessary. I used the mirror lockup function - which raises the mirror on the first shutter release and takes the picture on the second shutter release and then lowers the mirror. To reduce the vibrations of the mirror slapping up and down you raise the mirror wait for five or ten seconds then take the picture. I use a cable attached to the camera to work the shutter so that I'm not touching anything.

This is the photo that I was able to get.


Out on some back roads I tried to find something interesting to shoot as the sun was breaking the horizon. A stand of trees presented itself. Same kind of setup here tripod and mirror lockup.

The prairie is pretty flat and I think you need to really search to find some interesting things to photograph. I drove around for a while until the sun was up far enough that the day had begun and all the drama of new light had moved on. I was looking for wildlife now - last week I saw an owl flying around and I didn't have a chance to photograph it. So secretly I was looking for owls. They are supposedly active 60-90 minutes before and after dawn and dusk. So I kept driving randomly long the township roads and eventually came across this fellow in a tree.




It wasn't an owl, but he was very patient while I looked at him from a reasonable distance..

In the snow around the trees I saw some bird tracks and I could tell where a bird had flown in, landed, taken a few steps and stuck his head into the snow, then walked off under the bushes.. of course the bird wasn't there now. I'm almost certain it was an owl.. of course it was..  I know they are out there. You might think it was a hawk that made those kind of tracks that I described but they haven't migrated up yet as far as I've seen, and the magpies, well.. I just think it was an owl. :-)

Thanks for looking.
brad.