Wednesday, December 28, 2005

The annotated sunrise

I was almost hoping that the sunrise would suck this morning, so I could get some work done while the rest of the family slept late. Alas, as Whitman put it, the little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows...

So I shot this photo at 6:40:55am. By 6:43:41, some of the clouds were collapsing into rain or snow (I think the latter), falling toward the North then blowing South in a zig-zag pattern before evaporating above the warm Earth. By 6:50, the sky to the East was a brilliant orange. Even Rincon Mountain was smothered in an orange haze. By 6:55, the orange had spread to purple and pink, across a sky-wide spill of cirrus clouds. By 7:01 the show to the East was winding down, so I took my last shot to the South out the front door.

One difference with this series: I blogged a commentary from one end to the other, through all 50 pictures, with to-the-second time stamps for each. Oddly, you go forward through the series by clicking on the "previous" photo thumbnail to the right of the current photo. Still figuring out how to use Flickr, I suppose.

The series starts here.

Frank was here

On November 22nd, aboard a United flight from Boston to San Francisco, I spotted a city I was sure had to be Madison, Wisconsin — a state capital and a university sandwiched between two lakes.

I was reminded of this when Frank Paynter, a Madison native, dialed my number by mistake a few minutes ago. We got to talking, and I remembered taking those shots. I hadn't tagged them at the time; so I just did that.

So this seems as good a time to point toward a not-bad photoset that includes fighters in a dogfight, Wheeler and Jeff Davis Peaks (in Great Basin National Park), Newark "Lake", mines and power plants in the desert (though hardly deserted) West.