African winter sunrise and memories.

Something I remember from my very early childhood, -I must have been about five years old at the time-, is seeing a picture of a sunrise in a comic book. The picture is still very vivid in my memory, of a barnyard farm scene, with a rooster standing on a fence post crowing and the sun rising like a big orange ball behind the barn.


My mothers parents had a small 10 acre farm on the western outskirts of Durban and we went to visit one weekend, I decided to get up early the next morning and see if the sun really looked like that when it came up. (I needed proof of these things even at that early age). Early the next morning before sunrise I was sitting on the back step, no one locked their houses those days so it was easy to get out. I had no idea where the sun came up, so it was just luck that I was facing the right way. When the sun came up over the mountain opposite the house I was enthralled, it wasn't quite what the picture showed in the comic book, it was far more beautiful than I could have imagined. Since then I have been fascinated by sunrises. 


This morning I was out with my camera in the freezing cold to photograph the sunrise.

The first hint of the sun.

It's amazing how fast the sun rises, the earth is spinning on it's axis at almost 2,000km an hour, so that's how fast the sun is rises above the horizon.

Almost completely out.

To keep pointing the camera at the sun after this is to risk damaging the sensor and your eyes. By now I was freezing, the temperature was only just above zero degrees Celsius, so the dogs and i headed home, where two strong, hot cups of coffee revived me.
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