Sunrise Challenge

So over at Pioneer Women's blog under her Photography section she posted some wonderful pictures of some grass. Yes just grass. But taken during the sunrise -- with the sunrise behind the grass it looks like it was dipped in gold. It's very pretty. So her challenge was for everyone to take some pictures at sunrise. There were lots of whiners that didn't want to get up that early but I thought it sounded like fun. Crazy girl that I am. So I checked and the sunrise here this morning was at 6:40am. No problem -- that actually sounded late to me. I set the alarm for 6:15am -- only 15 minutes earlier than it's set for work. Wore pjs to bed that I could wear outside and was ready.

Funny thing is -- we don't get sunrises in the city. Between the fences, trees, houses, etc I couldn't see the sunrise. I stood there with the dogs and waited. They thought I was nuts and thought going in the house and feeding them was a much better idea. I waited until 6:50am and still couldn't see the sun. The dogs convinced me it wasn't going to happen. So I went in and feed them. After that I ran back outside -- just in case -- and there was the sun poking through the trees.

So I guess I'll never get the cool dripping in gold sunrise pictures but I did get some cool shoots with just playing with the setting on the camera. The backlight setting made a beautiful colored sky. And no -- it didn't really look like that outside. And no -- no photo shopping was involved there either. I just bought a copy of photo shop but I'm still clueless as to how to use it. I guess that will be my winter project.
So here's a sample of what I got:

Here's looking east -- where the sun should be -- using the landscape setting.

Here's the same shoot - 1 minute later using the backlight setting.










And here's the sun -- finally was able to see it around 7am.