From one extreme to another…

Having mentioned this before in other posts and pages on NoMoreDeadPixels I wont go in to detail but just say “I am obsessed with the weather”. Why wouldn’t I be, afterall it’s a photographers best friend. Living in the United Kingdom doesn’t exactly give us the ability to sunbathe 365 days a year now does it? The cold snap over the last few days has produced a few sunny spells but nothing worth going out for. However, this was about to change.

Yesterday saw quite a thaw over the pleasant West Yorkshire scenery but only due to a rise in the temperatures. The weather forecast last night showed a dramatic drop in down to well below freezing point with clear skies over most of the north of England. My thoughts as I went to bed were to set the alarm and get myself up and about for a sunrise shot. There havent been that many opportunities this year and here we are fast approaching April. Checking the sunrise clock on my phone things have really moved fast, the sun now rises at 06:07 as opposed to 08:14 when I got my last shots back in January.  The angle has changed considerably too as the sun rises further in the east as opposed to a south-easterly direction.

I set the alarm for 05:30 thinking that would give me ample time to get sorted and get myself to the airport perimeter. Living on a hill limits the locations available for a decent foreground (An essential part of low ligh/dusk and dawn shots) so without travelling a few miles I tend to stick to a similar spot each day. I actually woke at 05:00 and and peeked through the blind. The sky was clear and the stars were blatently obvious and this was my cue to get up. It was a good job I did too, the car was frozen, a hard frost too. I fiddled with the controls for a few minutes before I got it set right. Being a hire car and a different model to my own vehicle some of the settings were not as immediatley obvious but I sussed it in the end.

After driving towards the airport I reconisdered by original decision and decided to stop off at the dam to see what photographically, was on offer. The paling of the sky had begun and the bird life was bringing in the Thursday morning in style. It was very cold but I managed a couple of frames just before the sun made an appearance. A managed a couple of low-light photostitches before moving on to my chosen airport location 300 yeards away.

My calculation regarding the sunrise location was spot on, just to the left of the control tower and a couple of departing aircraft on runway 14 made some foreground subjects for a few more frames. They were slightly different from my normal approach and I dont mind explaining my ideas. I am never afraid of shooting in to the sun and I have reflected this in many other posts. I find that thinking out of the box and breaking the rules adds my personality in to the images. The results are very random and are a great challenge in Photoshop. I waited until the sun was quite high in the sky to grab some frames facing direct in to the light and creating lens enormous flare. This was just what I wanted. At sunrise the sun appears orange as it crosses the horizon, this is because air molecules and airborne particles scatter white sunlight as it passes through the Earth’s atmosphere. This is done by a combination of Rayleigh scattering and Mie scattering.
Pure sunlight is white in color, containing a spectrum of colors from violet to red. When sunlight interacts with atmospheric particles much smaller than the wavelength of visible light, a phenomenon known as Rayleigh scattering occurs. In this process, light is scattered in various directions, with shorter wavelengths (violet, blue, and green) being scattered more strongly than longer ones (orange and red). Because of this effect, the Sun generally appears yellow when observed on Earth, since some of the shorter wavelengths are scattered into the surrounding sky. This also makes the sky appear increasingly blue farther away from the Sun. During sunrise and sunset, the longer path through the atmosphere results in the removal of even more violet and blue light from the direct rays, leaving weak intensities of orange to red light in the sky near the Sun.

You can see the wing of the aircraft shadowed in the melted ice blowing off the runway. Looks quite strange doesn’t it? Please take a look at the full set in the slideshow below

Hope you enjoyed reading. Thanks for looking, please come back soon for some more “pixels”