Early Morning December

When I walked into my office yesterday, the moon was lighting up the room. It was moving down into the treetops to the west of our house. What perfect timing! I managed a few pictures…then continued with my normal routine of eating breakfast and checking the news feeds on my big monitor.

As I took my breakfast dishes back downstairs, I noticed that the east was photogenic at that very moment! I hurriedly put my dishes in the kitchen and ran back upstairs for my camera. It was about 10 minutes before sunrise…so the pinks dominate the oranges and yellows – particularly in the contrails. There are a lot of flights out of Baltimore in the early morning so if the conditions are ‘right’ for contrails to form, there are a lot of them.

I went back for a second look later to see if the blob at the end of the foreground tree branches (it’s the oak in our front yard) was a bird or a leaf….it’s a leaf!

January Sunrise

January is an excellent month for photographing the sunrise from our front porch: the days are still short so sunrise happens well after my normal time to get up and there are no leaves on the tress to block the view. A little over a week ago – I was lucky enough to catch a sunrise with the moon and Venus visible!

A little later on the same morning I focused on using the sunrise color behind some of our trees. This is the oak. The buds look large for January. They may have started swelling with the warm weather we had in December and early January.

The crepe myrtle has a lot of dried pods that make it look ‘decorated’ all winter long. It makes a good morning silhouette.