Up too early, luckily

Sunday morning I woke up too early -- much, much too early. The clock said 4:00 AM, and I was wide awake. I knew this was going to be a problem later in the day so I tried for about 30 minutes to fall back asleep, but it wasn't happening. Reluctantly I got out of bed and went to the computer. Read a few blogs, perused the day's headlines, looked through some old photos, and played some computer games. After two and a half hours on the computer I got bored and hungry, so made my way upstairs.

Surprisingly, it was still quite early -- just a little after 7:00 -- and the sun was just rising. Wow, was it ever rising!

***

The sky was just amazing:

Almost anywhere I looked out of the kitchen door I saw art.

Beautiful colors, textures, and shapes just everywhere up above me. I love abstract natural images like these!

Most of these shots are SOOC (straight out of camera) meaning they've had no processing, but some have had a slight contrast boost. It's skies like this that make photographers look good, because it's almost hard to take a bad photo.

Add some tree for contrast:

Still looks great. How about without the tree?

Fantastic! If I hadn't been using a manual lens (one that doesn't autofocus) I could probably have just closed my eyes and pointed the camera anywhere and would have ended up with a nice shot. Well, maybe not.


That morning was again just lucky timing on my part. If I had gotten up at 7:00 or so, I would have probably missed it -- I would have been too busy feeding the cats and been too sleepy to have noticed anything outside. If I had gotten up a little later, like 5:00 or even 6:00, I would have missed it completely because I would have still been on the computer.

The whole sky that morning -- as much as I could see from
 the kitchen door. I was using a 50mm lens, so to get this wide
of a shot I needed to stitch some images together.

Although I really needed a nap later in the day, I'm quite glad I woke up as early as I did. It's not every morning you get to see a sky like this!