I was out in the woods before 6 am this morning. I was hoping to finally figure out the exact trees my pair of Great Horned Owls use for perching every day. Well … although my buddies have hooted every morning for the past week, today my owls were silent. Perhaps the -8F temperature made them decide to conserve energy and stay mum.

While heading over to my owl trailhead I did notice that a great sunrise would likely occur. Thus, after giving up on my owls, by 6:45 am I was down near the mouth of the Lester River. The ice fishermen were gathering for their morning march out onto the frozen lake. The few clouds added to the scene, and made for my “ice planet sunrise” images.

For folks who have been following my Canon SX70 reviews, unlike most of my landscape images which I take with my Sony A6000, this morning I used my new Canon SX70 and a monopod for stabilization. The only issue I discovered is the native Canon RAW CR3 format required my to update my free Adobe Camera RAW DNG Converter to version 11.2. Once I figured out this issue and installed / updated my software I was good to go using Photoshop Elements.

The two images used identical settings except for the exposure. By shortening the shutter speed, I achieved colors which were closer to what I saw with my own eyes. Aperture Priority brightened up the photograph too much. Normally one might use a higher Aperture setting for a landscape photo, but I chose 5.0 on purpose given I had moving people in the photographs. I needed to “stop action”.

After my owl hunting and sunrise photoshoot, I was still home by 7:30 for a later breakfast!

Lake Superior Ice Planet Sunrise 1
(Aperture Priority … ISO100 … 1/25th of a second exposure … F5.0)

Lake Superior Ice Planet Sunrise 2
(Manual Mode … ISO100 … 1/80th of a second exposure … F5.0)