Lenticular Sunrise

dseidman · August 24, 2010

After shooting sunset, Ron Coscorrosa and I drove to Paradise to get a little sleep in the parking lot before shooting sunrise in the morning. Sleeping in the car was pretty much impossible so we started scouting for patches of wildflowers on the Golden Gate trail (in almost total darkness) for the two hours before sunrise. The sky was clear and the Milky Way was showing so I didn’t have a whole lot of faith in there being good colors for morning. With about half an hour until dawn, it appeared that some clouds had moved in and I became excited about the possibility of there not being just another boring sunrise. Ron and I eventually settled on a spot that looked promising so we just stood there and waited.

From where we were standing, we had two options for shooting. Looking to the North is Mt. Rainier, and in the opposite direction is the Tatoosh range, which is a small cluster of photogenic mountains that could also be used as a backdrop for the lupine-filled meadows that surrounded us. We decided that if one didn’t work out, we could turn and shoot the other. As the sky grew brighter, I remember commenting to Ron about an ugly cloud that was sitting just above the mountain and thinking it wouldn’t turn out. Just then, the clouds behind us (facing the Tatoosh) lit up and became vibrant with color. We both grabbed our tripods and ran the couple hundred feet up-trail to our preselected patch of lupine for facing that direction. Ron mentioned that we of course had to be facing Rainier for everything to look good in the other direction. I responded by saying that we ran all the way up the trail just to make Rainier get some good light (at this point I still didn’t think it was going to happen). Sure enough, a minute later Ron looked back behind us and let out a “holy s***!” I turned around and was equally stunned. The ugly cloud that I had mentioned before was suddenly clearly defined by the first rays of sunlight hitting it and to our surprise it turned out to be a lenticular cloud (something I’ve been wanting a chance to photograph for a long time). We immediately grabbed our gear and ran back down the trail to where we were before (pictured below). By the time it was all over with, we ran back and forth between our two locations a total of three or four times. The sky looked incredible in every direction so it would have been hard to mess things up on this morning.