Being a night owl, I’m not a big morning person- although as an nature and travel photographer, I’ve had to get up at dawn a ton of times to catch and photograph sunrise.
Sunrise not only has a wonderful quality to it with beautiful light, but air is usually cleaner and clearer. And although the first 15 minutes waking up is painful, I’m always glad I did so when I get out there.
Last Tuesday before returning to the Bay Area from the Pacific Northwest, I was due to photograph one of Jimmie Hendrix guitars at the Experience Music Project (EMP) in Seattle, Washington- one he smashed during a performance (for a Via magazine article). The problem was I needed to reschedule my flight and didn’t want to pay the change fee – so I headed to the airport with a friend at 6am, booked myself on stand-by for a noon flight, and headed back to downtown Seattle with another friend (who works in the financial district).
After catching a cab to the EMP (a wonderful music museum founded by Paul Allen) arriving there at sunrise, I had a few hours to kill so I decided to photograph the the Space Needle which stands right next to EMP. The light was beautiful and clear, there were few people around,
and I spent the next two hours playing around documenting some of the amazing architecture with a few of my wide-angle lenses.
Here are some of the images captured that morning with my Nikon D200 digital SLR camera– images I didn’t plan on taking, but was able to get due to certain circumstances, my experience understanding light, as well as creative play with no particular goal in mind. “Chance favors the prepared mind” as Ansel Adams once wrote.
The PhotoGuru Sean Arbabi 