A quick dash to get some sunrise shots on a trail near the house resulted in this.
Off late its been pretty awesome to predict when the weather conditions would be favorable for some nice colors either during sunrise or sunset. Thanks to the weather app windy, I have been able to get it right most of the times.
It didn’t seem so in this case. It was a pendulum like swing of deciding to wake up early or not. Nevertheless I managed to get up at 5 AM and checked the app. It looked like it’d be pretty cloudy, so I decided to have a coffee leisurely. While sipping on hot coffee, noticed that there might be a break and the cloud cover was changing pretty fast. A quick dash to a nearby spot and while I’m climbing the hill, the color looked like it was at its max. This wasn’t the composition I had in mind, but when you are scrambling to get a shot of the colors, all I could find was a trail and rich sunrise colors.
Over the years, my preference to compositional elements have evolved. Now I mostly look for having very little in the frame and one focal point. A sunrise/sunset would a strong focal point. Due to lack of an interesting foreground element, on a quick spur of the moment I included a morning jogger on the trail.
Its one of those pictures where I like it and at the same time hate it. Why? Because there are two strong focal points in this frame; Sunrise colors and the morning jogger. They compete to take the my attention. The strong leading line of the trail takes the attention to the jogger and rich vibrant colors to the sunrise. There is good amount of transitions in the frame; big to small, cold to warm but they seem really nice in isolation and feels chaotic when combined.
During processing, sunrise was my main focal point and jogger looked like a secondary element in the frame. With my mad rush to get a picture, I remember that it could be competing and yet the urge to get a frame with colors was so high that I grabbed one. Thanks to technological advances in modern day cameras, I could use the live histogram to get a proper exposure. I still can’t believe that this was the first frame shot during this shoot. A quick edit and voila, I was happy and published it.By afternoon, I was already having a battle in my head of ‘like’ & ‘hate’.
For a guy who was recently diagnosed as color blind, going after colors is kind a funny and gives out a nice chuckle. I guess I’ll remember this shoot for a long time just for the laughs it gets out of me.
