Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily Minneapolis Photography. Minneapolis Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains photography, composition and photo techniques.
Post-apocalyptic nuclear winter? Nope. Eight in the morning in Minneapolis. Like water in a Mad Max movie, sunlight is a precious resource in the northern latitudes this time of year. Someone once said that if God wanted us to see the sunrise, he would have made it later in the day. God wants us to see the sunrise here and now.
Yes, I’m on the roof. One of the perks of being a caretaker for my building is keys to the roof. Best place to see the sunrise. It’s easy to track the movement of the sun from the south to the north throughout the year. The buildings are on a regular grid, the white building in the foreground points east, so you can see how far south the sun is.
And yes, I processed this image. I had what I call an Edward Hopper image, high dynamic range (HDR). I shoot these in camera raw so that I have lots of information to work with. I lower the highlights and raise the midtones to keep the proper exposure throughout the image. So yes, the sky is not that moody, but this isn’t far off.
This is Uptown, the Famous Dave’s Ribs sign is the orange glow on the left. I love the light at the time I was shooting, lots of red in the sky and the light falling on the foreground is very blue. It really looks like that, the snow was blue. Normally you don’t notice that because your eyes white balance themselves so well. With the sky firing the red light right at me, my eyes kept their 5000K balance and saw the snow as blue. A cool demonstration of this was when I was coming back from the Northern Air Resort with Jeff at twilight, I turned on my laptop to convert the pictures, the gray mac startup screen looked red. I pointed this out to Jeff and he was mystified. The blue light of a winter twilight makes your eyes shift to see blue as white, so the actually gray screen looked very red.
More optic fun for you guys, so take time to look at how the light changes, but don’t, seriously don’t look directly at the sun.
P.S. My hometown of Kenosha took a real beating Tuesday, tornadoes in January! Take a look
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Well, I don’t know that this is post-apocalyptic, just winter in Minnesota. Come to think of it, though, may be it IS a vision of the Apocalypse. Heat death of the universe, etc.
By the way, you describe this image as HDR. Did you do it the full-blown way with multiple exposures and an HDR merge in Photoshop or did you twiddle a single raw image?
Your sunrise picture today is much more sophisticated than my sunset picture. All I had available was a point-n-shoot through a double glazed office window. I guess you had to be there.