Running Toward the Light

When I opened the curtains and door to the porch off my bedroom this morning the light was a soft, deep orange. I peeked out and looked around the corner to the east and the sky was a palette of brilliant color. To add to the dramatic beauty, fog hugged the ground beneath the oak trees.

I hurriedly threw on shorts and a hoodie and sprinted upstairs to get my tripod. I couldn’t find the ‘L’ bracket and hex wrench that attaches it to my camera. Dang it! Where is that thing? I said in a not-so-gentle-voice. I couldn’t find it so I grabbed an attachment for my old tripod and ran downstairs, tripping and nearly falling on the stairs.

My camera was still in the kitchen where I left it last night when I came home from a music event yesterday afternoon so I quickly attached the tripod foot and headed outside, grabbing my old tripod from the garage. As I was walking to the pasture fence I was attempting to extend the legs of the tripod. Of course, the legs wouldn’t extend (the reason I replaced it after a busy summer of salt-water shooting last year that basically ended its life). The sun was rapidly rising and the brilliant blue and orange and yellow hues would be gone within minutes.

Screw it, I mumbled and threw the tripod to the ground, adjusted the camera settings and started shooting. It was frustrating because I love very long exposures in light such as this as it enriches the colors. But this morning, I was doing the best I could given the time constraints and equipment snafus.

Challenges like I experienced at sunrise today are really quite funny. A part of me was calmly watching myself scurrying and hurrying and I knew that all of the effort might be for nothing….I could miss the sweet light. But as beautiful as the sunrise was, I had to make the effort.

Things in life that are beautiful are indeed worth the effort.