Just before we take off on a longish trip next week, I am going to do something for me very unusual: Post one single set of images not pertaining to any series and in fact not even related to traveling, but coming straight from my office window, inches away from my monitors - and the set comes with a big handicap.

But let me explain: Whenever we go on a long trip, I bring my camera in for a sensor cleaning, so I can start out with out fresh set of clear images, before these " fiendish" dust particles accumulate their residence in my camera body again. So this time, I was quite a bit early, brought the camera in to my favorite camera shop soon after we returned from the last trip. They always do a super job at this shop and I returned home with a pristine clean sensor - along with a substantial reset of my camera modifications. I am of course used to that, thus the first thing I did was to set set all the adjustments back again to my liking. But - dah - I forgot to check the settings on the camera lens, which I basically never touch, and so did not realize that the lens was no longer set on autofocus but instead rested at the ominous "M" setting.

Normally I am quite a late riser, except for when I do my travel series on UHH. For some unfathomable reason, on the morning of Christmas Eve 2023, I got up uncharacteristically early, and was already working in my office when luckily I realized that there was the first glimmer of a sunrise unfolding at the eastern horizon, well visible from my office window. I grabbed my "always-at-ready" Z7ii, swung the window wide open and started shooting. - When we moved from New York to Ferndale WA and purchased this house 16 years ago, we had a beautiful, unimpeded view of the skyline with Mount Baker and the Twin Sisters well visible, even if only as a rather narrow strip. Unfortunately, in the intervening 16 years, a bunch of not-so-welcome trees have sprung up behind our neighbors' houses and Mount Baker is no longer visible in the summer time, when the leaves on the trees block my view. But at winter time, the outlines of this volcano and the range are still visible, though only through the tree trunks and branches, but these can provide a nice effect. The few images below give you an idea of how the sunrise unfolded. I took a good number of the shots at the wide angle end of the lens, and these came out quite well. Towards the end, I started experimenting with captures of a variety of interesting developing moods, using the mid to telephoto range of the lens and that is when the quality went rapidly downhill. I am including a couple of these unfortunately unsharp images, just to give you an idea of how the light was changing - and I do hope that at some future date I will be able to catch another sunrise unfolding with similar interesting hues.

For completeness sake, I should also mention that for two of the captures I actually moved down to the ground floor entrance area of our home, to get a different angle with a bit more of the neighborhood homes and some Christmas lights on our bushes.

These images were captured with a Nikon Z7ii and the Nikkor 24-120/4S lens (set unexpectedly at manual, as explained above). I shoot Raw and process in Lightroom Classic - and no, I did not unduly "push" the colors in these images, just used my regular processes.


Notes
I am showing just 10 images in this set, if you are interested to see a few more, you can access my "interim album" with the following link - this interim album is not in my regular inventory of photo albums. Link: https://photos.app.goo.gl/AUvrBF6GrpArWCyJ8

Thanks for visiting, I recommend viewing the downloads and look forward to your comments and questions.

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