Sunflower Sunrise

Saturday evening, I went out for a quick ride in the neighboring prairie areas, right after a short rain had cooled things down to the mid 70s in terms of temperatures.  It had been a hot and sunny 93°F kind of a day and it had limited my riding a bit.

I left however too late to get a good picture of the double rainbows that have been appearing lately with each rain fall.  However, on the way home on the county road that leads to Jewell Avenue, I saw two vast patches of farmland just covered with sunflowers!  It's apparently a cash crop of sorts around here and I for one was glad.

The sun was setting as I found the field so the light was all wrong to take pictures then.  I returned to the fields shortly after sunrise on Sunday and got these pictures for your viewing enjoyment.

A seemingly endless sea of sunflowers

Brigitta with sunflowers to the horizon

I then moved Brigitta over to the next field full of sunflowers, positioned her on the corner of the field and got these shots:

An attempt at "artsy"

I hope you liked the shots, it would have been cooler to have permission to position Brigitta amongst the growing sunflowers but the above will do I think.

The rest of the day, I rode my Ural Sidecar Rig Natasha along with my oldest son Patrick, to Victor, CO to check out the working gold mining that's going on there.  I was tipped off as to the mine's existence by fellow Uralista Steffen; more on that ride in my next posting.

Update 10AUG10:  I went back this evening before sunset and setup Brigitta in the same spot as before (mostly), centering her with the setting sunset which was coloring the mountains in nice colors.

The kind of shot I hope to parlay into a magazine cover someday

Shooting into a sunset is really hard with my limited photo shooting skills and antique camera, this is a composite shot of two separate pictures, one optimizing the exposure for the sky, the other for the foreground

This is a single picture, massaged with picnik.com's tools, to bring out the sunset's lights

As I rode home, the sky was lit up in vivid reds, yellows and oranges, at some points it seemed the western sky was on fire.  It was quite a beautiful sunset to ride in, my photos are but vague allusions to the wonderful sunset we Coloradans were fortunate to see today.

Again, a slightly massaged picture to bring out the interplay of the setting sun's lights on the mountains

A closer view of the setting sun, just before it came out of the low lying clouds and became a blinding object once again in the eyes of the commuters.