…makes me happy…oh, sorry. Didn’t mean to kick into John Denver mode there. Yes, it must be a disorder: I was lying in a field at sunrise this morning, listening to my iPod and waiting to see what the sun would do. So much for sleeping in! Before getting down on the ground to get this angle, I was on my feet for a while. So I guess you could say I was outstanding in the field. Okay, I’ll quit the puns. Here’s the pix:

I was hoping that we’d get more of the red/purple thing that the sun has been doing the past few days, but that wasn’t the case. I believe it’s because of the clouds on the far horizon, which don’t give the sun a chance to refract or something to that effect. Not only did that strip the sunrise of its colors, but it also prolonged the time I had to shiver until the sun poked its head above the clouds. The wait was worth it, as I got quite a few neat shots. This is one of them.

There were some ups and downs to this little adventure. It seems that I can’t leave the house without something blogworthy happening, and today was no different. While I got lots of nice sunrise and pre-sunrise pictures, I also had some other trials. First, the cap for the lens I was using fell out of my pocket out in the middle of this field, and I noticed it once I’d hiked back to the truck. Being of the stubborn sort, I hoofed it back out there and actually found it within five minutes! To help, I brought the camera and lined up the picture the same way, then followed my tracks back toward the truck. Whew! Canon charges an arm and a leg for those things. Oh, one more thing:

This is what the last few photos looked like. Yuck. As it turns out, the beautiful little prime lens I was using to shoot this somehow sucked a bunch of dust into itself. I got home, looked at the pictures, and was immediately horrified. Inspection of the lens showed that yes, there was some nasty gunk on the lens…but not on the outside! Somehow it had gotten inside. That’s a mystery to me.

A lot of those other dots are caused by a dirty sensor on the camera. This is a problem unique to digital cameras, since film uses a new surface for each exposure. When you own a digital camera where you change lenses a lot, there comes a time to clean it. Sensors attract dust, and dust shows up when you point the camera at bright stuff with narrow apertures (I think this was f/22). Drat.

I just ordered a couple of different sensor cleaning kits, so it’s time to try them out. It’s never fun to stick foreign objects into a $1500 camera, but I honestly don’t trust anyone else to do it for me. I’ve always been the same way with my motorcycles, mountain bikes, and other stuff. There are too many horror stories flying around out there. So I’ll be sticking a solvent swab into my computer very soon. Hopefully I’ll do it right, or it’ll be hard to come up with more photography for the ol’ Blog!