I’ve been thinking about photographing the sunrise from the Eagle Mountain lookout all winter. But sunrise requires getting up early – or anyway, earlier than I normally do on a day off, so I just haven’t gotten around to hiking up the mountain until now. Today’s sunrise was at 9.19 so I can’t claim I’m terribly sleep deprived, even if I got there over an hour before because I wanted to catch the wonderful dawn colour gradient which is at its best about an hour before sunrise.

When I saw the images on the computer, I got a minor shock – photographing a clear sky with a small aperture revealed a whole lot of dust specs on the sensor. I’m somewhat underwhelmed by the dust prevention in the 40D… Besides dust specs, I also cloned out some pesky birch branches that invaded the frame on the right. The Eagle Mountain lookout isn’t really ideal for photography but the view is great, warts and all.

Since it’s the last day of 2008, I made an issue of catching the sunset as well. But sunsets don’t know the calendar so it had nothing special to offer and in the end I preferred these radiating clouds in the west and deleted all the actual sunset images I had taken. Can’t win ’em all.

So much for 2008 then.