2015 August 23rd not a bad morning: red sun and floatplane

The hydro (electricity) was scheduled to be off in Moosonee today so we were up early to make coffee before it went out. I checked outside and it really did not look that promising. No glorious sunrise seemed to be in the offing.

A bit later there was a little bit of colour down the river before sunrise so I headed outside. Nothing spectacular. Some cranes around but it was pretty dark although they were pretty loud.

Other people told me they saw a quartet of bald eagles at the other end of the sandbar. Also saw a hydro boat traveling to and from Moose Factory -- figured they were picking up workers.

All of a sudden things picked up. A red sun started to rise across and down the river from where I was shooting from the Two Bay docks. I had come outside with a 70-200mm lens and all of a sudden I wanted something longer.

It took me a few minutes to get back to the house and pick up something more suitable. The sun was still red but unfortunately it was also quite bright which meant it was not possible to really place it within the landscape. I tried an HDR sequence but didn't like the results when I processed them later.

The power was supposed to go off at 7:00 a.m. and sunrise was 6:23 so I didn't have a lot of time to process a few pictures before I shut down the computer. Got a few posted and turned it off and waited for the darkness.

The darkness was a bit slow in coming but eventually did. Didn't seem much else was likely but all of a sudden I noticed that the floatplane that had been docked was moving. Got a couple of shots of it from the top of the river bank as it taxied down the river.

It taxied a long way. I had time to get back on to the dock at Two bay where the aircraft would seem to come almost right at me as it took off before it turned and revved its engines for take off.

I was shooting RAW so I had to watch out that I did not overflow the buffer on my Canon 7DII. Takes a little discipline, learning not to just press the shutter and fill the memory card.

Got a reasonable sequence of the aircraft, a Sealane 182 taking off. Processing them was interesting since the sun had been on the far side of the aircraft. Finally decided to heck with the background and worked on keeping the near side of the aircraft reasonably light.

A lot of pictures so I decided to create a separate gallery on my smugmug site and just post links to that.

One comment I got later on was that the Sealane 182 had a three bladed propeller and the aircraft I photographed had a two bladed. A few internet sites later taught me that the plane could have two or three blades so I left my captions alone.

I took a few other pictures that I didn't use; ravens following me around looking for breakfast, people camping on Charles Island.

The past couple of days I had been using my new Canon G3X but today I used DSLRs. There is no way to follow a fast moving object on a back panel the
way you can through a viewfinder.