Before Sunrise

I woke up early yesterday, and a minor miracle occurred. I actually got dressed and grabbed my camera gear. It had been about two months since I had done that — got up early and headed out. But, the sky was clear (too clear for the best sunrise) and the weather was not too ominous (for a change), so out I went.

I just drove around the corner really, not much more than a mile, and stopped where I had taken my solstice photos that a few might recall. The corn had grown very tall, and I wanted to get a contrasting photo. Well, it turned out that it was too tall to see beyond to the glimmer of light, so I mostly took surrounding photos.

These were all taken just before sunrise when the light was just peeking over the horizon. It can really be best time to shoot. All but the first of the photos have a partial Orton Effect applied in post production: "Orton imagery, also called an Orton slide sandwich or the Orton Effect, is a photography technique which blends two completely different photos of the same scene, resulting in a distinctive mix of high and low detail areas within the same photo." (Wikipedia) Of course in the digital age, we tend to produce the effect in post and not by actually sandwiching two photos.

Since the corn was too tall to be really a viable subject, I included the fence in the first two to use a bit of a foreground element.

Then I turned about 90° to the right and shot down the lane with the corn field of my left.

There were two driveways to the property, so I moved to the other one and took a photo that included the sign: Beckwith Berries and Wild Blueberries. They put up a stand even nearer us in strawberry season, and we enjoy several quarts during the Wimbledon tennis tournament.

Finally, I moseyed across the road for this shot.

It was good to get out again for the specific purpose to taking photos as opposed to snapping pictures when primarily doing other things. I woke up early again this morning, but a look at the thick clouds induced me to roll over — rather a typical morning for this odd, rainy, cool summer.