Day Thirtysix: Chaumont Sunrise

It was 52 degrees in Chaumont, NY this morning. I looked out and saw some fog. At 7:00am I took the household trash out to the curb and noticed the Sun rising between my neighbors houses. I photographed it. These photos were made with a Nikon D2H camera. The noise in the shadows with this camera are horrible. This is not one of my favorite cameras. Anyhow, I opened them in Photoshop. The colors were all over the place. I fooled around awhile and tried to get them to look like what I saw. In the upper photo I added some saturation which seemed to bring the sky around to something acceptable. On the lower photo I played around with the color balance, taking out some green by adding magenta, and adding some extra red & yellow. When I tried auto color or auto levels the sky went really blue. A strange, unnatural blue. I mention it because it's difficult to make a good sunrise or sunset because of the intensity of the Sun against the rest of the scene. Thus I shoot numerous exposures to try and strike a balance between the Sun and the rest of the scene. Then, when the photo is made smaller and saved as a GIF for the web, the color pallette becomes reduced and more compromises enter into the equation. I'm not sure how well any of this translates in this final blog posting. I'm not sure it even matters.

On another note, notice the power lines. Do they bother you at all? Years ago some of my photographer friends and I used to lament the existence of power lines and how they screw up an otherwise nice scenic. However, I have come to accept them as a part of the sceneery in which we live, and it simply doesn't bother me anymore. If the lines are there I just accept the idea that they are a part of the subject matter. Don't let a few wires stop you from making a photograph.