Techniques Moments of Light Morning Glow Sunrise Animation Sunny 16 Rule Why Use a Tripod?

This image is a composite of five sunrise shots that I took at Arches National Park. The massive stone formation is several hundred feet high, and as the sun came over the horizon it touched first at the very top, then gradually moved down the stone, painting it with a marvelous golden glow.

Due to the limitations of bandwidth, browsers, graphics files, and a number of other factors, I can't really show you what I saw. But this is an attempt at doing that. The whole animation may take up to two minutes to download, depending on how fast you connect to the internet.

Figure 1 – Sunrise Animation

Below are the five images that the animation was created from. First I scanned five photographs that I took while the sun was coming up. I then cropped the image to show just the single stone formation. Next I imported each image into an animation program, and had it build a transition, where each image sort of "melts" into the next. That explains the blurring that you see sometimes in the image.

If you have read this entire page, then the animation file should be done downloading by now! Take a look. It won't be the same as being there, but it truly was a dramatic scene.

Sequence 1	Sequence 2	Sequence 3	Sequence 4	Sequence 5