"Always Look On The Sunny Side" - Start where you are.
Apr 27, 2022
Sunrise is such a special time of light.
When things are just waking up and the scariness of night is chased away. Every time I am up for a sunrise, I feel my energy returning with the power of the light.
The only problem is, it comes so early in the morning! Especially during the cold winter months without daylight savings time.
But I will let you in on a secret.
When you shoot in a valley, you get extra time before sunrise. The morning I took this shot, the sun came over some horizon at 6:42AM. I was still happily sipping hot coffee in my room and bundling up at that hour. Since I stayed very near the park this trip, I didn't actually leave my hotel until after 7. Still, I managed to get a lot of great "sunrise" shots as the light came down into the valley around 7:30.
The inverse is also true. Night comes early in the valley. I have driven as far as an hour back towards my home after it was too dark to shoot Yosemite itself. Before getting some great sunset shots from the foothills across the flatness of California's Central Valley to the west.
Which reinforces the idea that everything is relative. To make sense of what is happening to us, we need to have context.
So much of the information we take in is geared towards the big sweep. Even local news covers a whole county or city, or region. And we won't even mention slanted, abbreviated, twisted, or flat-out made-up information circulating around us.
(Quick aside, many people who read that will assume I am talking about one group or another. Depending on their own perception of context. And they will all be right.)
But that general view may or may not be relevant to you and where you are. Everyone needs to learn to make decisions based on what is happening specifically to them. And I don't mean what they are being told is happening to them, but what is actually happening to them.
So I encourage you to listen to trusted sources to provide a context to what you see. Probably 2 or 3 sources who come at it from slightly different viewpoints. But in the end, always trust your reality right where you are.
(Unless you are taking mushrooms. Then you may want to get a second opinion).
I always try to live by one fundamental precept: Reality trumps everything.
No matter how badly I may want things to be different right now, I always have to start from where I am.
And so I go from here.