Woke up this morning at 0530 hrs. To quote Adrian Cronauer [Robin Williams] in Good Morning Vietnam: "What does the 'O' stand for? O my God, it's early!"
I had looked at the weather forecast yesterday and decided this morning would be a good morning to go photograph the sunrise. But as sun rise was at 0824 hrs, there was a bit of time to kill, so I started doing some work kind of stuff. Of course I then lost track of time and the next thing I knew, the time was 0730 hrs and the pre dawn light was already in the sky, and I really should have been in the field of my choice by now.
Grabbed my gear and jumped in the car - which was frozen solid and needed time scrape the ice off the window before I could go anywhere. By the time I was out of the town, the first rays of light were just showing in the night sky. FAR too late!
Quick change of plan to a closer location. As I was driving past Muirhead Reservoir, I saw the sky reflecting in the water, showing brilliant colours with a near perfect reflection. turned around and parked to walk / jog the path down to the water side. Set up and fired off one or two frames. As the sun broke the horizon, I knew there was no way to get the range, so I thought I would do some exposure bracketing and combine the images to produce an HDR image. Then it hit me, I had no idea where the setting were to automate the exposure bracketing. On my D70 it was not problem, I could probably have done it in my sleep, but I used the D70 for about 8 years. I have only had the D700 for 4 or 5 months and have not used it nearly as much as I would have liked to or, it turns out, learned where everything is yet! I tried manually setting the bracketing but on my return to the PC, there are very small movements which meant producing an HDR image was more effort that it was worth. This may or may not also have had something to do with me also leaving the remote cable in the car.
But I managed one frame that I thought was quite nice: Muirhead Reservoir Sunrise
And the moral of the story: Get there in plenty time and know your gear!