In Search of the Sunrise.

My roommate (actually floormate) Jonathan recently got his first DSLR camera, a Nikon D90. This morning we got up at 6 AM so he could try out his new camera by trying to photograph the sunrise. I found a nifty little program online to tell me exactly when sunrise and sunset (and civil twilight, and nautical twilight, and ...) are so we'd be sure to get there before it happened. We made one small mistake, though: the sunrise isn't visible from the location we chose, near Coconut Island in Hilo Bay.

Despite this slight miscalculation, we still managed to get some nice photos, such as this one of a cruise ship coming into the Hilo harbor:

That's Coconut Island on the right.

Here's one of the bridges connecting the island to...well, the bigger island!

The still waters of the Lili‘uokalani Gardens provide ample opportunity for reflection:

Ahh...tricky picture, no?

This is about as much as we saw of the sunrise:

There was a huge banyan tree behind where we were standing, and as the sun came up, you could see the light reflecting off its higher branches first, as in this picture:

This is the sign you can see in the above picture:

But one of the feral cats we saw this morning.

Jonathan (sans beard) and his new toy:

Another little island in Hilo Bay, with downtown Hilo in the background:

One final sunrise shot:

This is not the same picture as the one above.

And now, for the first time ever on this blog...a video! Jonathan's D90, being much newer and more advanced than my D40, has the capability of shooting high-quality video, with some pretty decent sound to boot. He took this movie this morning, and graciously let me use it.

He pretty much sums up what happened there...and yes, next Sunday we're planning to do it again, but head somewhere else where we should have a nice clear shot at the eastern horizon.

(You'll also notice I'm bundled up pretty warmly in that video, that was less because the air was cold [it was merely cool] but because of the wind chill from riding on Jonathan's scooter to get there. And yes, even with all that on, I was still cold while riding.)