Sunrise at Landscape Arch in Arches NP. When I imagined taking this video what I had in mind was the shadow cast by the arch span moving slowly down the wall of sandstone behind the arch. However, some sandstone fins in front of the arch really block direct sunlight briefly at the start of sunrise so that by the time the shadow forms it is already half way down the wall. Also if I were to try this again it would be nice to find a higher vantage point from which to record the sunrise to get a better view of the changing shadows on the arch.

I got out here early enough that I could still see the stars in the west. This presented the challenge of trying to choose the right exposure so that the highlights wouldn't be totally blown out when the sun started to rise. I decided that there was not going to be any one correct exposure for the entire sunrise and decided that I would manually control the shutter speed while holding the aperture constant to maintain the same depth of field throughout. So, while I was taking pictures over the course of two hours I had the camera set to show the histogram of each shot after it was taken. When I noticed the highlights getting close to being clipped I would speed up the shutter by one step and continue. As you watch the video you will be able to recognize the places where shutter speed was adjusted. The change in brightness between shutter speed settings ended up being a lot more noticeable that I had hoped.

Its possible that more work in post-processing the images to blur the gap between shutter speed settings would help this problem but I'm going to have to continue trying to think of another way to achieve the effect I'm looking for.

I've painted this scene, which can be viewed at http://rarebowl.blogspot.com/ .