A Candle for Paris

I started working on this blog entry on November 13; an attempt to catch up after too much work and too little time. But the tragic events of November 14th made it impossible to continue as intended. So I will simply share a few of my photos from our trip to Paris this summer, and offer my condolences and prayers to all those that have been touched by the violence...

 

 

The Nightshift in Stockholm

A rare trip for client meetings in Stockholm in October had me booked morning till nightfall and left me few options if I wanted to take any pictures... A sturdy tripod, my Canon 6D and 17-40mm lens were included in my carryon bag. The weather in October has been either fantastic or windy and rainy, and as luck would have it I had a couple of fantastic evenings in Stockholm with almost no wind, making for some beautiful reflections along the waterfront. After a quick subway ride from Kista and a 10 minute walk I was on the shore of Malarstrand and began working my way towards Stadshuset (City Hall), then continuing on to Gamla Stan (the old town center) and finishing across from the sailing ship and youth hostel A F Chapman.

The Joys of Jet-Lag

I admit I am an early riser; even on weekends I typically get up at 6AM. But when we visit my parents in San Diego with a 9 hour timezone change, I'm really lucky if I can sleep until 4AM, or at least I toss and turn until 4AM. But every cloud has a silver lining, and being up early in San Diego where the weather is almost always fantastic means having plenty of time to photograph the sunset.

This year I decided to try some downtown skyline sunrises. So after 17 hours of travel and 5 hours of sleep I was good to go, but still managed to misjudge the best time to photograph the sunrise. With the official sunrise at 6:43  I assumed 6:00 would be plenty early, but no, with clear skies the sky was already too light and the skyline was only a silhoutte. But I figured out where I would set up and checked lenses and exposure times and made another visit the next morning after again waking at 4:30.

Thanks to cloudy skies and being a few minutes earlier the lighting was better and the sunrise more colorful, but the mirror-like reflection of San Diego Bay was disturbed by an early morning cruise ship, akthough the cruise ship did add a nice touch...

By 6:15 the waters were still again and the pink sunrise made a beautiful backdrop to the Coronado Bridge and Seaport Village.

The next morning at 5:50 I went looking for a different foreground and wound up at the sailboat anchorage closer to downtown, which was a nice change but without any clouds the sunrise wasn't very colorful.

A couple more days of less than spectacular sunrises and then on the 20th of December I was pleasantly surprised by the rising new moon on Dec at 5:44AM where the entire disc of the moon was visible thanks to the clear skies, photographed here with the Canon 300/2.8LIS

But the sun and moon move very quickly this far south so it was only a matter of minutes before the moon was too high to shot with a telephoto lens and I had to use 24-105 at 47mm, but now the sky was coloring up beautifully...

A week into our trip and our jet-lag was almost gone, and there plenty of other late trips and activities to keep us busy around Christmas, but I had to photograph the sunrise on New Year's Day and from some place new. So it was a quick trip to Coronado Island to photograph the sunrise from beneath the Coronado Bridge...

Happy New Year 2015!