Sunrise, Sunset

Yesterday was a big day for morning and evening photography.

Calgary sunrises are often pretty to look at, but don't photograph particularly well because there are no clouds. There is a beautiful colour gradient, but it never looks quite right in a photo. Unless you've got something dramatic happening in the foreground, it's actually a pretty boring shot.

Sunsets usually have cloud, but are placid ho hum affairs much of the time.

Every now and then either can be beautiful and you wish you had a camera. A bit more rarely you get spectacular and you grind your teeth with envy when your photo buddies post their awesome shots. Even more rarely is the morning and evening of the same day, AND be there with a camera.

I just made it for the sunrise, having to forego coffee, grab the camera, and run. This is one of the 'reject' shots. I don't have many to choose from since I got there late.

Here's a 4 shot panorama you may have seen on Facebook, though that's a bit misleading. The proportions are almost exactly 16:9, which I can get from an individual photo. The difference is there is far more detail, since I was shooting the individual shots as portrait. It turns out to be 9936 x 5802 px.

Sunset I saw coming in plenty of time to be out and waiting. First, here's some of the 'reject' shots over about a 10 or 15 minute period. They start looking more to the south, as the colour gradually arrived from the east. I love the delicate texture and curlicues of cloud here. They show up beautifully on my version, not sure how well they'll show up in the blog version.

Off to the west, colour developing.

This is looking north west.

This is looking almost due north. I'd say that's lots of colour.

I was walking back to the house when I realized if I stood on the street and played chicken with a bus, I could get this nice silhouette of the tree.

Here's the sunset 8 shot panorama taking up about a quarter of the sky. It turns out to be 14978 x 5963 px. Or in print terms, about 48 x 20 inches at 300 dpi, meaning extremely high quality print. For something like this you could double that size and still look great.