One reason I want to cultivate once again the restless mood that drove a lot of my picture-taking for years was that I discovered that if you got up an ungodly hour and went walking with a camera in your backpack, in part to try and catch the light of dawn in what photographers call “the golden hour”, you see a lot of things that you wouldn’t see otherwise.
Partly that’s just because you’re in a position to see anything at all. It’s about proportionality. Walk more often through more places and you get a different understanding of what’s unusual and what’s normal, especially if you’re walking at a time when relatively few people are out. In a suburban area, for example, you end up seeing foxes and various raptors (including owls) way more often than you would at any other time of day.
But you also come across scenes that are unusual in some other sense—or where the light makes them unusual. In the middle of the day, this scene of workers doing something? in San Francisco would have been lost in the bustle of people walking through and around the scene, but also the lighting wouldn’t have made the big crate as visually interesting as it was about fifteen minutes before daylight.
Especially in a city, but even in the suburbs, there’s a more secret time still, about 3:30am or so, where you really don’t want to be walking around by yourself taking pictures. For one, light in the heart of night-time doesn’t make for good images, even on long exposures, unless there’s something interesting to look at that has some light of its own (a neon sign, a lit window, or the starry sky). For another, there’s very few people out and about, and the ones who are may pose a problem for the walking person. Not to mention the fact that while folks are generally wary about photographers taking shots in public, they’re very (legitimately) certain that someone wandering around taking pictures at 3 a.m. is suspicious.
But right before dawn, the mix of people in public spaces is interesting: work of various kinds is starting, early risers are out exercising or walking before work. Landscapes that were just dark outlines are acquiring contrast and structure.
Most folks are either early risers or late sleepers. I don’t seem to have as fixed a setting—I’ve shifted back and forth over the years, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not. But when I’m in an early rising phase, I have loved the unfamiliarity of the dawntime world. Things look different, and it’s not just the lighting that makes it so.
As a woman, I’m especially leery of these pre-dawn walks, but I am an early waker and I have been tempted. The sky looks different then in the not-quite-night. Thanks for sharing the picture of people already working before most are awake.