Up at Sunrise

After a day of acclimating to being home from our road trip, I began to look at some of the lessons I’d missed in BeStill 52.  One jumped out at me right away, because it featured photos of cows. Cows! It turned out that the lesson challenged us to change things up, to do something different.  For Kim Klassen, this meant cows; for me it means traditional landscape photography.

I am pretty intimidated by the kind of photography that involves neutral density filters, polarizers, higher f-stop numbers (deep depth of field), tripods, composing a landscape shot, and, especially, getting up early to find the perfect light.  This is the kind of photography that the people in my camera club are good at. Upon reading the lesson, I realized that I had been dabbling in that on our vacation, well, actually on most of our vacations.  I always excuse my mediocre results by explaining that I never get up early enough to get the perfect light.  Well, this time I did.

I didn’t have to get up especially early, get in the car, drive to the scenic spot I had scouted out the day before, hike in,  and then set up among other photographers all with better equipment than I have.  All I had to do was roll out of bed, grab my camera, and walk out the door of our hotel room in Moab- because this is what was outside:

This is the same scene that I photographed in the sunset shots I posted Friday.  What a view!

I didn’t use any filters (although my ND ones would have been useful if I’d brought them!), but did bracket my shots just in case.  So. . . I think this foray into early morning landscape photography qualifies as changing things up.  Next time, maybe I will actually drive somewhere!