Who can see a red sky in this flipping black and white world I’m stuck in!?!?
Wednesday is here again, and as you know, since this past April I’ve been inspired by the Serendipity Photo Prompt my fellow blogger Marilyn would run on this day each week to dig into my photo archives to tell crummy stories from even crummier pictures that spewed from my camera. Since I plan to continue on even though the prompt has now been retired, I figured I needed to rechristen my Wednesday photo contributions with a spiffy new title…. so I am proud to announce that Wednesdays will now be known a Picture Day here at The Nest! I even doodled up a nifty little logo for this newly named venture that took up most of the time this morning that I would have spent coming up with the actual post. So today, you’re all getting treated to a quickie!
It could be a sunset, or possibly a house fire. Who knows with that tree in the way…
Sunrises and sunsets can make for some truly eye-popping photos if they are sufficiently colorful enough. I’ve seen some really beautiful reddish-orangish-purplish sunrises while leaving work in the early winter… but not being one of those camera phone people, I’ve never managed to capture one of them. And at home…. well, take a look at that photo of what was a very brilliantly orange sunset over my backyard a few months ago. If my tree were any leafier, you wouldn’t even be able to tell there was a sun at all back there. If I really wanted good photos of the sun on either horizon, I’d have to do about a half mile of walking to get it…
Or I guess I could just draw it…
If you are a fan of early sunsets, this is definitely your time of the year. As I once tried to explain in my infamous analemma post, in the middle latitudes, the earliest sunsets are found not at the Winter solstice, but in early December! In fact, the sunsets are already beginning to creep slightly later each day where I live. But for those who prefer a late sunrise… this is all balanced out by the time our star first peeks over the horizon each morning continuing to get later and later right on through early January. Go ahead and sleep in! You’ll still be able to capture nature’s beauty…
Or not…
I’ll try to find some prettier pictures next week…
Evil Squirrel's Nest 
I never got a good picture of a sunrise or a sunset…. but now I can hit the trash-button…. many moons ago I waited 8 weeks to learn that I’m NOT ansel adams :o)
I think Ansel had a very, very, very early edition of Photoshop. 😉
Coincidentally, I had to look up this saying recently since I could remember the sailor’s delight part, but not the other half: red skies at morning, sailors take warning.
I hate the fact that, since the time change, I see both sunrises and sunsets. I’d be perfectly happy never seeing the sun rise.
I can do without sunrises around the equinoxes, which puts the sun directly over the road I go home on at the precise time I leave work. For completely ignorant reasons, I also don’t like that it’s still light when I wake up in late Spring and early Summer (Thanks DST!). Is it really a bad thing if the sun comes up at 4 in the morning?
At this time of year I refer to our sunsets the orange smudge– gorgeous, but blurry no matter how I try to photograph them. Not alone with this problem, I see here.
My handicap is obviously physical obstructions… but I’ll bet I could mangle a pretty sunset photo if I ever got the chance!
I did not know about all this analemma stuff. I’m sure it’s something I read about but couldn’t store in my memory since I couldn’t fully make sense of it! Perhaps if I could see more of the sky from my house I could map it out and then understand it better but, alas, my view of sunrises and sunsets is much like your view of summer sunsets.
I only know of the analemma because of a Geography class I took my senior year of high school. Never heard it mentioned before anywhere else. I guess with globes going out of style, the analemma will eventually just become another historical artifact…
BTW, I love the Picture Day logo!
Thanks! I really didn’t spend but about 30-45 minutes on it… yet it turned out a lot better than I thought it would. It almost captures the cheesiness of those awkwardly bad school pictures…
I’ve always appreciated nature, but it wasn’t until recently that I truly took interest in sunrises and sunsets. Now they are among my very favorite things to photograph!
I’ve never really had the opportunity to photograph either. I really should keep my cheapie camera in my car over the next month or so, because there’s an excellent possibility at least one morning in the near future will have a picturesque sunrise, and there aren’t many obstructions around my store.
We need all of the casts picture day photos!
I wouldn’t hold my breath on that…. but, if you’d like to see my terrible attempt at turning my characters into chibis:
https://evilsquirrelsnest.com/2015/05/01/little-rascals/
And yes, it includes both of your favorites…
We are crowded by trees on every side, so all my “taken at home” sunrises and sunsets peek from between naked branches. Naked, because when they are leafy, there IS no sky. None. I feel like a hobbit living in a hole. Maybe I am a hobbit and this IS a hole?
I vote for a house fire on the first one.
It is 4:37 here … and it looks like midnight. I think I’ll go start dinner. Or something 🙂
Being as far north as you are, and on the eastern edge of a time zone, you get the real early sunsets! I used to be an avid viewer of Around the Horn on ESPN which aired at 5 PM your time, and during December I was always amazed at how it looked like the middle of the night in the real-time background behind the Boston reporter who’d be on the show. When I went to Cincinnati on the opposite end of the Eastern Time Zone a few weeks before summer solstice, I couldn’t believe there was still light in the sky at 9:30 PM! The last signs of twilight are always gone by then here…
But we could have 4 AM sunrises if it weren’t for stupid DST!
I’ve got a solstice post of my own in the works, so don’t show me up! (Honestly, it would be tough not to show me up. My solstice posts always suck.)
I remember you put me in my place when I did the analemma post… I will not trample on your plans this year. It will be the best solstice post evah!
And I’ve actually had a few ideas pop into my head for a possible guest post! I’ll probably know by the end of my weekend (Friday) if I can help out or not…
There’s you umming and aahing and taking photos of a beautiful “sunset” while your neighbour’s house burns to the ground 🙂
That’s funny since I once actually did take pictures of my neighbors house while it burned (not quite to the ground, though). That was a previous prompt, though… 😀
Sunrises – snorts with piggy laughter. Only if the sun rises after I’m out of bed say around noon – XOXO – Bacon
Really! Who needs the sun to dictate their routines anyway, Heck, I just woke up this evening at 10:45PM! Take that, stupid sun!
Amen ES – I like the way you think! XOXO – Bacon
Thank you for the quickie…your tree is a beauty! Mine are almost bare! 🙂
That tree is bare now save for the pair of squirrel’s nests that remain. I wouldn’t have the horde of sciurine visitors I have without it!
Don’t you love it when your friend returns from FiJi with 87 photos of the sun doing things? I think hang gliding would be the best way to own the sunset but ooh how cute are those critters holding tails? Very cute. ❤
Ugh! That reminds me of the guy I used to work with! Great guy… but every time he took vacation, he whipped out an envelope containing about 9,000 photos and would be heartbroken if you didn’t look at every single one of them! They followed a pattern too… the first photo would be some object worthy of being photographed, the second photo would be his wife in front of the object, and the third photo would be him in front of the object. Every once in a while, there’d be a fourth photo of BOTH of them in front of the object! And this went on and on and on….
Of course, I’d probably bore people with endless photos of the same squirrel! 😀
It’s the same here – the sunrise is still getting later, but after the 21st, the sunset starts to move back. Phew. I was beginning to think I’d have to really hibernate soon.
The sunset time is usually pretty stable during the month of December (It never fluctuates more than a two minutes for almost three weeks straight here). I’m trying to envision how that would work at more northern latitudes without consulting sunrise/set tables… I think the displacement of the sunrise/sunset extremes might be less where you live than what I experience.