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!