I had fed everyone but a useless night’s sleep had me chored-out by five, this morning. It was pitch back outside and I decided that I could comfortably make it to Ballast Point in time to catch both twilights.
So, I grabbed a coffee, a few different lenses, and said goodbye to the babies and I was gone.
It was just a few minutes into the drive when I realized that it wasn’t just dark, there was a serious fog accompanied by all the “drive carefully” warnings along the interstate.
I checked the weather app on the phone and it said partly cloudy, but I figured even if the clouds swallowed the twilight, I might get some cool fog-effects down at the bay.
Unfortunately just a few minutes from Tampa, the fog completely disappeared taking that possibility with it.
That left just me and the clouds and if they were in the right place above the horizon, they might give me some good colors to play with.
It was still really dark when I got there, but from what I could see, it looked like they were hugging the horizon and therefore likely to snuff out any chance to a decent twilight.
This reality threw me into a different mode, scarpering around looking for anything else to shoot other than the horizon. I shot the piers, but there wasn’t anything new there that I hadn’t already shot. I even switched out lenses a few times; from the 11 mm super-wide to the 28 mm standard, to the 600 mm zoom.
Try as they might, none of them gave me anything memorable.
What finally did give me something was when a beautiful young lady named Libby, sat down on a swing bench to watch the sunrise and take guidance from a book she was reading. Thankfully, she wasn’t freaked out by the weird old guy with a camera who kept taking silhouette pics of her.
Simultaneously at the old shorter pier, I noticed a young man in morning prayer also seeking guidance, I suspect.
I have attached a number of shots that show the progression from real darkness to the actual sun rise. Twilight, I am sorry to say, didn’t really happen.
My favorite shot is the very last one in the bunch at the end of this blog. In the foreground, she is staring off into the sun rise, mid-ponder, and in the distance, he is staring off to the same sun rise, mid-prayer.
I hope you enjoy!
The blog thought began to form in my head, mid-scarpering, while I was down there and it played within my head for most of the drive home.
You see, clouds that appear in pics can play a number of roles. They can be the source of gorgeous colors lighting up the skies at sunrise or sunset. They can add character and depth to an otherwise solid blue sky. They can even become a subject all of their own when they adopt interesting shapes that conjure up magical creatures in our minds.
Tragically they can also rob images of value, like they did this morning, stealing the twilight and threatening to make my drive a waste of time.
In this mode, they become obstacles and hindrances, that stop us from seeing what it is we want to see. There are many euphemisms of such a role, where a confused brain is described as cloudy, and judgment become clouded by too many factors or distractions.
And here is where we have to adapt ourselves, much as I did in a practical sense this morning. We have to change our focal point and find something else that we can grab onto and make the subject of our moment.
I was lucky to find such a lovely subject this morning, to where the relevance of the skies were relegated to a mere backdrop rather than being the subject.
In life, we need to do the same, switching gears and finding a positive that we can grab onto. It is easy to allow the negative to dominate our thoughts and become the defining moment in our day. I have fallen into that trap many times.
But, if we can find something that adds purpose or generates a little happiness, or provides a little win, then any negative that happened become merely a backdrop to whatever we have managed to achieve.
I don’t pretend to say that we can outweigh any negatives that happen in such a manner, but at the very least we can try to find something that softens the blow to our day.
I have done this a number of times and have reaped real benefits at night when laying my head down on the pillow. I might lick my wound from the negative a little, but then console myself with an “at least” of some sort.
And some times, the “at least” actually turns out to be better than whatever it was that injected a negative into your day. I got one of those this morning … thank you, Libby!
… just a thought.
