A new day, a new year

Let the early morning view from my computer-room window on December 3 of what is now suddenly last year serve as a welcome to this new one. A healthy and satisfying 2019 to us all.

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

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Morro Rock

Within an hour of leaving the Piedras Blancas Elephant Seal Rookery in San Simeon on November 3, we arrived at our Morro Bay hotel. It was close to the coast, so when I awoke early the next morning and saw some color in the sky, I hurriedly walked the few blocks to the water in hopes of recording the famous Morro Rock at sunrise. I think this was the only time in my life I’ve done back-to-back sunset and sunrise pictures.

© 2016 Steven Schwartzman

Chisos Basin at dawn

On November 23rd, our last day of the Trans-Pecos trip (these travel posts aren’t sequential), we went out while it was still dark in hopes of seeing a good sunrise. Though we didn’t get a fantastic one, we did see some pleasant early-morning colors from the Chisos Mountain Basin in Big Bend National Park.

© 2015 Steven Schwartzman

Cattails by pond at dawn

Twice in the fall of 2014 I pulled a Steve Gingold by going out in the dark before dawn to places where I could get in position for daybreak. Last year I showed a picture from the first of those two sessions but none from the other. Here, then, on the one-year anniversary of that second dawn expedition, is a photograph taken at a pond on the eastern side of Buda, a rapidly growing town south-southwest of Austin. Cattails (Typha latifolia) stood between the water and me.

© 2015 Steven Schwartzman

The day with two dawns

As Phileas Fogg found to his great relief (in the form of a gain rather than a loss of £20,000), and I merely as a curiosity, travelers crossing the International Date Line from west to east gain a calendar day. For me the most recent eastward crossing of the Line took place on February 27th, which I remember as the day with two dawns. You’ve already seen pictures taken during the first one, which I lived through at Little Manly Beach on the Whangaparaoa Peninsula north of Auckland. The second dawn, shown through the safety of an airplane window and the convenience of an iPhone camera, came to me over the Pacific Ocean as we approached the California coast.

Here then, after five installments, you’ve finally reached the last of the photographs you’ll see from the great and fondly remembered New Zealand venture of 2015. Any of you who’d like to take a stroll (or more properly scroll) back through all 70 (!) of the posts about New Zealand may click here.

© 2015 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: Rangitoto Island seen from Little Manly Beach early on the morning of February 27th

If you’d like to learn more about the extinct volcano that is Rangitoto Island, you can read the website of the Rangitoto Island Historic Conservation Trust or a Wikipedia article. And if you’d like a closer and more-abstract view of the rocks on Little Manly Beach by the dawn’s early light, just look down.

The sea now gets to lave the shore
That lava got to lave before.

© 2015 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: Last morning in the country

On February 27th I got up early and walked the few blocks down to Little Manly Beach, where I photographed the sun rising over the Hauraki Gulf.

© 2015 Steven Schwartzman