Consider this part II of the Mono Lake extravaganza. After spending the night in the car in the parking lot, it was time to be up for sunrise all bright-eyed and bushy tail.
While I hardly slept at all, it was pretty easy to be wide awake with a quick opening of the door to suck in some 9 degree morning air, dry or not. The wife slept through it all pretty peacefully. Although, I woke her up to see if she wanted to join, she passed on the opportunity in favor of a couple more hours of shut-eye.
While it seemed pretty clear all night long, I was afraid it was going to turn out she was the smart one as some clouds rolled in right before the sun popped up over the horizon.
It looked like it was going to be a good day to do a study of black and white images of the tufa towers. We knew it was going to be a long shot that we would have a spectacular sunrise since we were only going to be here for one morning, but still we held out hope.
And although I like black and white as much as the next guy I was starting to get a little disappointed when it seemed like it wasn’t going to be. It’s not like we could shoot up here some other weekend. We need to move some of these spectacular wonders of nature further towards the heartland.
I’ll let you know how that works out in a later blog.
Anyways, I decided to follow my own advice and not give up too early on the light. Many times I find just when you think mother nature is done painting the sky with all the colors of the rainbow, she surprises you with a final encore.
She didn’t disappoint in the end. Although it wasn’t the the greatest sunrise ever, it was certainly better than the way it started out. Anyways, this is one of my favorite photographs from the morning.
This was shot with CPL filter and a graduated neutral density filter. Also in post processing, I left the white balance as shot (a hair off from what it should probably be, but I like the warm color on this one).
The color in the sky probably lasted less than a minute before it was gone.
I hope you enjoy.
- Canon 5d Mk II, ISO 200, Canon 16-35L MkII @ 16 mm, f18, 1/20 sec., CPL and Grad N/D filters
