A Deeply Southern Sunrise

A client that knew this spot well once asked me why her picture of this tree didn't look like mine.... more

by JC Findley

Title

A Deeply Southern Sunrise

Artist

JC Findley

Medium

Photograph - Photography

Description

A client that knew this spot well once asked me why her picture of this tree didn't look like mine.

I explained to her what went into this image.

This particular image was actually three years in the making. When I first saw the lone live oak in the middle of a cotton field I was in between cameras and the cotton had been harvested before I got my new one.

I went back the following year but the farmer had planted soybeans that year.

The following year I saw that he had planted cotton and made plans to shoot the scene a week or two before they harvested it. I made the two hour trip to the field only to find that this field was the first to be harvested that year and it had been done the day before I arrived.

Last year I wasn't going to let that happen, I saw that cotton had been planted so I drove by every single week to check on the progress of the cotton field. When the cotton started to pop I monitored it closely until the whole field was finally white with cotton almost ready for harvest.

Once the whole field was white I started setting alarms for 3:00 AM so I could make the drive and be at this field an hour before sunrise and repeated that process until I got the light and color in the sky I wanted for the image I had envisioned in my head three years before the first time I saw this particular spot. Every morning I would pull over on the side of the highway with my camera on a tripod on the roof of my truck by this field until the light was finally right.

So in answering why my image might be different than any other you might see of this spot the answer lies in the planning and perseverance. This image was literally three years in the making from the time I envisioned it in my head to finally getting there at a time when everything came together.

Great photography is all about being in the right place at the right time and knowing what to do when you are there. Luck can and does work in my favor from time to time but more often than not it takes effort to put yourself in the right place at just the right time.

I hope you enjoy this southern sunrise as much as I enjoyed everything that went into capturing it.

Uploaded

November 4th, 2015