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I woke up yesterday morning to a strange sky. The front of my house was bathed in sunshine while the back of my house was this very dark blue sky.

Correction: it wasn’t the sky that was this dark blue, it was the clouds.

We had a storm warning, you see. We’re supposed to get around 5-6 inches of snow between Sunday night and Tuesday morning. We shall see about that.

I ran back up to my room, grabbed the camera, changed to the 18-400 mm lens and rushed back down. It was less than a minute, tops but the sky was no longer this dark intense purplish blue. Instead, it was a lighter, still darker shade of blue. Still, I panned the camera around looking for a composition and found one with my neighbor’s aspen trees. The sun was shining on the white branches at that moment.

I actually had to look it up how dark is the color cobalt blue. The color reminded me of the times when I would use a CPL (Circular Polarizer Lens) filter on my camera and all the skies in the picture would be an unnatural shade of blue. Cobalt blue was that color.

I no longer use any filter on my camera, except maybe a ND (neutral-density) filter when I shoot long-exposures. The screwing on and off the filter is quite bothersome in my opinion as it not only takes time but each time when I tried to take the lens filter off, my anxious mind would begin playing out the worst scenarios.

So I’d say, “screw it,” I don’t need filters.

This was one of my favorite photos taken in Niagara Falls, by the way. I have been practicing my sun-star photography when I can. I read somewhere about sun-star photography can tell how many (blades?) is in a lens.

I remember that morning, just walking along the path, checking every few seconds to minutes, hoping the sun would just rise above the clouds, even just for a few seconds because I wanted to photograph the full sun, not just half of the sun with a cloud beneath.

At last, the sun had risen above the clouds. I set the camera to the lowest f-stop and clicked. I wanted to click another one but by the time I checked the photo and tried to focus again, a cloud has once again covered the bottom half of the sun. I was glad I got one though.

#SundayStills