Not All Sunrises Work Out

Something happened to our camera lens when we tried to shoot the sunrise after spending the night at White Sands…something we didn’t expect but probably should have! Now we have to admit that we don’t usually photograph sunrises because we’re not really morning people, but we couldn’t pass up the rare opportunity to photograph the first signs of light amongst the dunes. So after setting our alarm the night before, we woke up to darkness and all things frozen. Our tent even had icicles on it! But determined to get the day started, we dragged ourselves out of our mildly warmer tent and climbed up the dunes to set up our camera/tripod and wait…and wait we did. It took almost an hour for the sun to reveal itself while we walked around, jumped around, and did whatever it took to keep warm. Honestly, it wasn’t pleasant, but we were quite excited when the sunrise show finally started. It was beautiful…absolutely beautiful! While clicking away we periodically checked the condition of our camera. We noticed the body had some frost on it, but the camera monitor revealed no issues with the photo…so we kept on shooting. Unfortunately though, we couldn’t tell that something was actually wrong. It was not until near the end of the sunrise, we started seeing fogging come through in the pictures. We had failed to clean our lens throughout the shooting session which devastated us…maybe a little too dramatic…more like saddened us because our photos were distorted, and we knew we couldn’t ask the sun to do the whole sunrise thing again. Lesson learned is all we can say…lesson learned!