Grandview Sunrise

Waking up at 5 am is not very exciting, even for a hobby I enjoy… sadly, I’ve picked photography and scuba diving for hobbies, both of which have the best results early in the morning. I thought I had a decent plan on where I wanted to go for sunrise on Grandview drive to get the sun rising over the river bank and find something interesting in the foreground but once I got there I really struggled to find something good. I settled on using the tulips (spring is here!!) as foreground with the sunrise glow illuminating the river, however, I couldn’t figure out a good composition that didn’t include the sidewalk, I wish I could invert my tripod (a wish-list item for a future upgrade). Once the sun started coming up, the sky was on fire but I didn’t have any good ideas… so I decided to shoot the tulips close and focus stack the background (more practice).

I was also struck by how some of the trees were budding (and starting to look like trees again) while others were still barren and looked more like roots than branches, that juxtaposition was really neat…

Once the sun was up, I really struggled to find something interesting and decided instead of head over and check out Rocky Glen Park, which has been recommended to me but I had never been to. I followed Google Maps directions and ended up in someone’s backyard, luckily it was still early and no one was there to be alarmed by me. I got out of there in a hurry and eventually found a small designated parking lot that recently went in. Friends of Rocky Glen is restoring the park for public use and has been putting in trails but they don’t have trail signs yet so it took me a bit to recognize where the trail out of the parking lot started… I didn’t find it right away because it goes straight up the hill from the parking lot, I was probably wishfully thinking it was going to be an easy stroll but it ended up being a great hike. Even though there are no trail signs yet, the trail is marked with small orange flags and I also marked each turn on my GPS. Hiking down into the glen was steep but it was really cool to see the rock formations so close to home. However, it was very disheartening to see all the graffiti (two photos from my phone below) which made me look for a different angle and I decided to take a 4 photo panorama looking back the way I came (I lost a lot of pixel in the stitched panorama despite having my camera level, I need to get better at vertical pans).

Finally after all that, I took a long nap in the afternoon and also, to be perfectly honest I didn’t wake up till 5:20 and didn’t get out of bed till 5:30… I’ll try to do better next time.