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.
