Skyline - March 27, 2020

Left the house with about 30 minutes before sunset. There were clouds in the sky and I was hoping that they would catch fire today. I didn't have much time and I knew that after the sun fell any foreground light would be pretty dark so I decided to head towards Deerfoot and 17th ave for a view of the skyline. I was visualizing a horizon shot with colourful skies. I wasn't sure that once I got there if I'd head north towards MaxBell or south to the bluffs over the canal.

As I drove up 17th ave I figured heading north towards MaxBell would be the better option due to the positioning of the sun. I ended up sitting a streetlight waiting to turn left for waaaay too long. The intersection has been modified somewhat recently to include an express bus route lane, with that and the various advances it seemed to take forever before my light turned green. I was losing sun! From there it's sort of a convoluted path through residential housing to get to the MaxBell parking lot.

I drove past the middle school that I attended so many years ago. My memory banks were tweaked and I started remembering all kinds of random bits of my childhood. It's kind of cool how we can have inactive thoughts in our heads that are activated by visual stimulation. I attended that school for thee years in the early 80's during my formative years.

Just missed the sun.

As I finally pulled into the MaxBell parking lot the sun had just dropped out of view but the sky was still glowing.. I quickly stopped and took this photo out the car window just in case it suddenly became pitch black and I ended up with nothing for my trouble.




There were a few other cars parked in the lot watching the sunset. I parked a short distance away from them (social distancing and all..) and packed up the camera bag with a wide and a zoom lens. I started hiking up to the top of the bluff above the bike paths when I realized I'd left the tripod in the car. I was hoping to get a higher angle view of the skyline that would include the river. Perched up on a retaining wall high on the bluff I watched the light change, taking photos every now and then.

fire skies.

I didn't intend to move very much so the view would remain static with only the light and maybe different zoom lengths to differentiate the photos. I was bracketing photos to help capture the dynamic range of the scene. It would have been helpful to have the tripod for this but instead I tried other tricks like holding the camera super still and balancing it on my knee.. neither were all that successful and some of the slower shutter speeds turned out blurry.

Fading light

It seemed like all of a sudden the clouds had lost their colour so I packed up and headed home.

Here's a link to my photo site if you want to see the photos larger.

Thanks for looking.