Kings River Sunrise

A couple months ago when I went to check out Eagles Nest Falls in the Madison County Wildlife Management Area I found this magnificent view of the Kings River valley. I made a mental note to try to get back there to see the fall foliage at sunrise. I figured this Saturday would be perfect because the switch back to standard time on Sunday would make sunrise come earlier and make it less likely I would be able to get there early enough. (I realize that sunrise happens when it happens and we humans are the ones who put a time to it. But these are mental gymnastics I used to convince myself that rising at 5 a.m. was a good idea.) My dad was in town and he’s always up way too early and he enjoys a good hike, so he was game to go along with my idea.

We got there about 30 minutes before the sun popped over the horizon, but fog covered the valley and hid most of the color in the trees below. That was kind of a bummer, but the scene was still beautiful.

I’ve been meaning to try the Strobist portrait technique of shooting with the sunset as a backdrop and using a flash on the subject. This sunrise presented the opportunity but I didn’t bring any of my flash gear with me so I had to use the pop-up flash on the camera. I got the ambient exposure and then I walked up the flash manually until I got the right exposure on dear old dad. I think the flash was on 1/2 power. I was surprised the pop-up worked so well.

I made this pano shot using the photomerge feature in Photoshop. I don’t have one of those fancy pano tripods so the resulting picture was kinda hinky on the left side and I cropped off about a quarter of the shot. You need to click this one to see it bigger and get the full effect, such as it is.