Conclusion

Dawnwatch from an East-Facing Balcony in Sydney

Hi

This is my last blog post.  I’ve posted all my videos and commentary on dawns from an east-facing balcony in Sydney that I intend to, and I hope I have inspired others to do the same, or at least to get up early and watch the dawn more than just once a year.  I look forward to watching other fantastic dawns on YouTube from all over the world.

A final comment:  ABC News 24 is still using those two photographs from Voldemort Dawn and Lava Dawn respectively on their program; the golden spiral appears in a slice of the regular weather intro, and the tropical dawn under brown clouds with surfers on the beach in the foreground features as a blown-up backdrop to the weekend news presenters. 

I reproduce a photo of each that regular ABC News 24 viewers should recognize.  It seems there will be no fresh dawn pictures on the news until spring, when these wonderful dawns will begin anew. 

Take care and keep dawn watching.

Signing off

S E Champenby

Dawnwatch 22/01/2012 Bipartisan Dawn

Dawn from an East-Facing Balcony in Sydney

This is the last dawn I shall post for January 2012.  Another surprise in that I had enough suitable photographs to cobble together for a video.

Bipartisan Dawn:  Sunday, 22 January 2012

This dawn begins with a wondrous scene of the quarter moon in the sky and the golden light of dawn rising from below.  I always find these occurrences where the moon, the dark night, and dawn’s early light are all present in the sky together fascinating.  However, it’s the clouds that make this dawn interesting.

Although there’s plenty of cloud activity low near the horizon, high altitude cloud is sadly lacking.  You can see from a wisp of high cloud coloured pink that there will be no colourful pre-dawn pinks display today.  What might have been is but a dream.

The reality is a fat cloud moving across low on the horizon just as the sky turns gold with the oncoming sun - and promptly splits in half.  The cloud, that is.  Actually, it looks like a map picture of Papua New Guinea, but that was a bit of a mouthful to name this dawn.  In any event, it’s that divided cloud, with the sun’s bright rays seeming to slice it like a knife, that gives this dawn its name, Bipartisan Dawn.

The cloud breaks up, and another fat cloud rolls along to block the dawn sun.  I pack up my camera and return indoors; the bright light of the sun has hurt my eyes.  That’s enough dawn photography for one day.  Unfortunately, not a particularly memorable or great dawn - unless you’re interested in PNG.

Catch the video on YouTube here.

Souvenir posters and mugs of this dawn are available from the Gagothicfunk store at Zazzle.com as displayed below:

Don’t forget your humble photographer also writes fantasy adventure fiction under the name of S E Champenby.  Paperbacks and epubs available from Lulu.com at S E Champenby’s store.

Dawnwatch 20/01/2012 Peachy Dawn

Dawn from an East-Facing Balcony in Sydney

This dawn was a surprise - a very pretty peachy surprise.  Upon checking, I discovered I had a sufficient number of photographs to cobble together a video.  So here’s the commentary.

Peachy Dawn:  Friday, 20 January 2012

A black and white beginning to this day’s dawn.  There was no colour in the sky, only a low cloudbank that broke up in fits.  Nothing remotely interesting, except for the bird that perches on the telegraph pole to take a look. 

Things begin to develop when a pipeline of cloud snakes across the horizon, leaves, and later comes back again.  Odd, to say the least.  There’s a hint of golden sky below and a touch of pink above in the clouds.

Colour truly comes to the sky once the sun peeks above the true horizon, not the line of trees on the ridge you can see in the photos.  Soon enough anyway the sun appeared on my horizon, too.  The golden glow of the sun and the pre-dawn pinks of the clouds are in the sky at the same time.  The result?  A peachy pink dawn. 

The pipeline of cloud returns, only thinner this time, and seems to capture that golden colour to prevent it from filling the sky.  But then the line breaks up, and a large cloud moves in.  The sun is forced to rise through the cloud and produces some mildly spectacular photographs.

Not a grand or fantastic dawn by any measure, but certainly a pretty and unique one.

Watch the video on YouTube here.

Souvenir posters and mugs of this dawn are available from the Gagothicfunk store at Zazzle.com as displayed below:

Don’t forget your humble photographer also writes fantasy adventure fiction under the name of S E Champenby.  Paperbacks and epubs available from Lulu.com at S E Champenby’s store.

Dawnwatch 24/01/2012 Neapolitan Dawn

Dawn from an East-Facing Balcony in Sydney

The photographs selected for this video were very much a scrounge job.  No selection was involved; I had to salvage whatever I could get, all the photos available with roughly the right perspective.  I think it turned out reasonably okay.

Neapolitan Dawn:  Tuesday, 24 January 2012

This dawn began with invisible cloud haze creating pink streaks across a dark blue sky.  Thicker clouds were already moving low across the sky in cotton ball puffs.  The horizon was, of all colours, yellow!  But the yellow wasn’t the sun rising - that comes later, as the photographs in the video show.  The light on the horizon was playing tricks, and there were more tricks to come on this truly remarkable dawn.

As the light increases, the dark sky turns slightly purplish, but the vivid pink streaks remain and are joined by yellow streaks!  Again, the yellow is not the sun, but the colour that the clouds are reflecting back.  I’ve never seen anything like it.

You can see why I called this Neapolitan Dawn.  Those layers of colours.  That triple-decker cloud stack.  All irresistible reminders of Neapolitan ice-cream.  Of course!  Yummy :-)

Most incredible of all, as the early pink streaks fade, the yellow horizon turns green.  This is a most rare occurrence.  You hardly ever see green in the sky, and it rarely turns out in photographs.  I lowered the midpoint colour a little, and there it was.  This was one of those dawns that looked much better witnessed first hand because the photographs didn’t do it justice.  However, I am very pleased that that marvellous green was captured in the pictures.  Usually, that doesn’t happen.

Just as the sun peeks above the horizon, the twin jets appear, one after the other, leaving white cloud streaks behind them.  It can’t be pleasant for the pilots, flying into the sun every morning.  Luckily, their jet streams are far enough to the right to avoid appearing in the video photographs - unlike Apocalypse Dawn, where their presence was unavoidable.

At the end of January, the sun rises smack bang in the centre of my horizon, behind the telegraph pole.  This morning the sun did so as the clouds began to mass and threaten rain and thunder.  A fantastic picture and a memorable finish to this morning’s video.

I rate this video a must-see, and you can catch it on YouTube here.

Souvenir posters and mugs of this dawn are available from the Gagothicfunk store at Zazzle.com as displayed below:

Don’t forget your humble photographer also writes fantasy adventure fiction under the name of S E Champenby.  Paperbacks and epubs available from Lulu.com at S E Champenby’s store.

Dawnwatch 07/04/2012 Royal Easter Dawn

Dawn from an East-Facing Balcony in Sydney

This is the last autumn where I’ve posted a video because I can no longer see the sun rise; it’s disappeared behind the northerly trees.  For this video, I ran the pictures together in same time sequence because this dawn did not progress in stages.  Small changes - the shifting clouds, the light of the rising sun - added up to stunning big changes.  The photographs will explain everything I’m trying to say.

Royal Easter Dawn:  Saturday, 7 April 2012

Awakened by the sound of birds going crazy.  I don’t know why, but this was the last good dawn until I guess spring later in the year.  And it chanced to happen during the Easter holidays when I had the leisure to photograph.  The birds at least knew that Easter Saturday was their last opportunity to celebrate.

The dawn began with the clouds eerily lit with pink light.  Weirdling clouds revealed as the dawn light begins.  It was still pre-dawn dark despite the pink, and my initial photographs consequently have a slightly unfocused quality from the long exposures.  Must be something to do with the season, but there was some magnificent stuff going on in the sky, an unfortunately barely enough light to capture it with my camera.

As the sun rises, the pink glow cast by invisible cloud wisps reflecting back dawn’s pink light suggests a reason why this dawn lacks light.  The opaque veil of cloud is hampering the morning light from penetrating through.  Pink mingles with the blue background to create a stunning purple sky.  This contrasts against the thick lower clouds on the horizon between the trees that are ochre red.  I toyed with calling this dawn Ochre Dawn, Wild West Dawn, or Purple Plains Dawn, but in the end opted for Royal Easter in honour of the holiday date and the purple skies.

The low clouds begin to broil, churn and burn like a fiery furnace, and the higher clouds reflect back the reddish light.  I was afraid the reds wouldn’t turn out properly, and I was right.  The real thing looked more dramatic, but at least the photos give you an idea.

The colour in the lower cloud bank fades, and the higher cloud puffs are chased away by streaming white clouds.  The bright azure canopy properly belongs in the midday sky, but it’s put in an early appearance, as the greying cloud on the horizon proves.  Morning meets dawn and clash in the same sky.

If a single word describes this dawn, it would be stunning.  Royal Easter Dawn did not have the contrasting and very different stages of the magnificent dawns, but the progression of dawn passing into morning certainly produced a series of stunning pictures.

Anyway, if you skipped the book, as they say, you can catch up with the video on YouTube here.

Souvenir posters and mugs of this dawn are available from the Gagothicfunk store at Zazzle.com as displayed below:

Don’t forget your humble photographer also writes fantasy adventure fiction under the name of S E Champenby.  Paperbacks and epubs available from Lulu.com at S E Champenby’s store.

The Sydney Writers' Festival 2012

Fantastic venue - near Sydney Harbour Bridge

The SWF is over for another year.  The highlight of the festival for aspiring writers was the So You Think You Can Write forum, which was held on Thursday (the same as last year), a working day, in the hopes of keeping the numbers down on this most popular of talks.  

What happens is, ten aspiring writers are randomly plucked from the audience to deliver their three minute pitch to a panel of three judges from the publishing industry.  The judges, well, judge.  A very important event for learning what’s happening in the publishing industry and what they are looking to publish.  Indeed, what could be more important for an unpublished author to learn?

The Green Room: where invited writers chill out

The good news is:  fantasy fiction is in!  It was the flavour of last year, too.  Strange then that I haven’t had mainstream publishers ringing on my phone.  The bad news is:  short stories are out.  Apparently, Australians simply don’t buy collections of short stories; they don’t sell.  Too bad, because my next project will be a novella or a short story. 

For established publishers, a collection of short stories may be uneconomical to print, but I reckon they’re the best introduction for unpublished writers via epubs - short in length, easy to read, quick to produce, and sell online at a low retail price.  Nobody is going to pay a lot to read an unknown author, but if the blurb seriously catches the reader’s interest and the price is negligible, then people may take a chance on a purchase.

Long queues (sigh)

The winner of the So You Think You Can Write forum was an erotic novel along the lines of Fifty Shades of Grey - an ebook penned by unknown author EL James that is currently selling like hotcakes, if you didn't already know.  Sadly, the judges confessed they didn’t understand why vegetables were found scattered about the bedroom. 

Allow me to enlighten you.  In the days of old Arabia, when women were confined to harems, it was common practice to cut up all vegetables before serving them to the women.  If that isn’t enough of a clue, there was a trial in the NSW Supreme Court several years ago where a man murdered his wife for having sexual relations with a cucumber.  Yes, this happened in modern day Sydney.  Which just goes to show you that even a humble vegetable can lead to murder. 

View of the whole SWF shebang

As more than one author at the festival said - Michael Robotham, Isobelle Carmody, Scott Westerfeld - it’s the true bits in fiction that readers find unbelievable.

Dawnwatch 28/01/2012 Apocalypse Dawn

Dawn from an East-Facing Balcony in Sydney

What do you do when insects, birds, planes and jets intrude into your photographs?  I for one welcome birds; in dawn shots, they add an extra nature element.  Insects often appear as a blur and wreck the picture.  Aeroplanes you just have to put up with if they are moving slowly across the sky just when the most brilliant dawn spectacle is underway.  As for high altitude jets and the white streams they leave behind, well, sometimes they are just unavoidable, as happened today.

Apocalypse Dawn:  Saturday, 28 January 2012

A messy dawn.  Bits of cloud against a clear sky.  That’s how it began.  And as the dawn progressed, more bits of cloud appeared.  Itty bitty bits of cloud dotted the sky.

The pre-pink dawn and the light blue of the sky combined to produce an incredible purple sky - stunning against the glory tree.  That’s the tree planted in front of my building facing from my balcony south-east.  Often east and south clash behind that tree to spectacular effect, and this morning was one of those days.

Moving on, the sky becomes multicoloured, resembling Neapolitan Dawn.  The purple sky is breaking up into its constituent rainbow colours.  Increasing light also reveals that all those little clouds are dark with rain.

At this point the first jet appears, streaking across the sky towards the as yet to rise dawn sun.  This is so early in the morning that the white jet stream appears as yellow.  So that’s the yellow vertical line in the picture - an incredibly messy picture.  We’ve got a multitude of cloud puffs, a multi-coloured sky, and now a vertical jet line.  I’ve slowed down the video so that you can absorb the confusingly complicated busyness in the photograph.

If that wasn’t enough, jet number two appears and leaves its white streak across the sky, following jet number one over the horizon towards the as yet to rise dawn sun and a little over to the right, as usual.  These two jets regularly appear at dawn, much like I see the same birds every morning.  How many times have I posted pictures depicting three cranes?  I must tell you, it’s the same three cranes every morning!  But I digress.  If the trio of cranes appeared this morning, you’d never see them in all the mess.

In the final phase, a little wind springs up and causes the pieces of cloud to congregate.  It does so in a very unnatural odd-shaped clump that covers only half of the sky, then slowly creeps across.  The rising sun bathes the sky in golden light.  But those angry dark clouds like the exhaust from cannons, the grey of supposed smoke in the sky, the vertical streams from the jets, the electrical wires strung across like barbed wire - it’s so very easy to imagine this dawn as the picture of a war zone.  This is Apocalypse Dawn.  In the words of Pro Hart, what a mess!

You have to see this dawn to believe it.  Catch up with the video on YouTube here.

Souvenir posters and mugs of this dawn are available from the Gagothicfunk store at Zazzle.com as displayed below:

Don’t forget your humble photographer also writes fantasy adventure fiction under the name of S E Champenby.  Paperbacks and epubs available from Lulu.com at S E Champenby’s store.