At the end of my Puddles at Sunrise post, I mentioned how I nearly missed out on another amazing photo. This is that photo – a glorious sunrise behind the Nubble Light itself. I was tired and not thinking clearly, and after getting the earlier photo my brain kept telling me “go home, we’re done.” It wasn’t until I saw another photographer shooting in this direction that I realized I could do more.

I love visiting Maine in the summer, especially on the coastline where I can’t get enough of the beaches, lobster rolls, and great scuba diving. One of my favorite spots is the Nubble Light, and I wanted to give it a try for a sunrise photo on a trip I took last summer. But good sunrises are driven by cloud structure, and the sunrise forecast on SunsetWX was consistently unfavorable. Then on one morning things looked a little bit better, so I chanced it.

When I think about my many photos of Vermont, this one has long been one of my favorites. And like so many of my photos, this one has a story about combining timing, location knowledge, and weather. They all aligned to let me take this photo, and any one of them could have ruined it otherwise. Thankfully, the end result is a nearly perfect capture of Vermont as a place and a feeling. 

When my company had a team trip to the Grand Tetons in 2016, I was super excited for the opportunity to see an incredibly beautiful mountain range. One of the activities we could choose was an early morning animal photography experience, where hypothetically we would get to see some of Wyoming’s extraordinary wildlife up close. This event turned out to be kind of a bust – we mostly stayed in a bus and drove around looking for wildlife. And while we got to see some animals here and there, it was tough taking great photos from a bus by the side of the road. 

One of the things about traveling to Sydney from New York is that the jet lag will wake you up early. The time difference is 10 hours ahead, tomorrow, which more or less means that you want to be awake when everyone else is asleep and vice-versa. While this can be incredibly annoying, it does have the one benefit of making it easy to plan for sunrise photos. If I’m going to be wide awake anyway, I might as well capture something special. So it was with this in mind that I started looking for a place to go and see the world wake up.