I almost used this photo as my first shot for 2026. I thought it would be a pleasant way to ring in the new year, even though my first photo of said year would not appear here on the blog until several days after the year began. No matter, I thought. I could come up with a couple metaphors to apply here, having to do with the start of something new, bright things ahead, and so on.
So what happened? Why didn’t this image appear in conjunction with a change of the calendar? Honestly, and this is going to sound kind of silly, but I promise it’s true: I just forgot. I almost never put up photos on Weekly Fifty that coincide with any temporal calendar events and, if I do, it’s usually just a coincidence. In this case, it’s kind of the opposite in that I actually did think about using this as my first photo of 2026 when I took it, but ended up waiting until a few weeks later because it, as Dave Barry would say, I swear I am not making this up, just slipped my mind.
A few weeks ago I wrote about how one of the most important things you can do if you want to take good pictures is to have a camera with you. It seems kind of silly, and pretty obvious, but it really is foundational to any good photography. Or even any bad photography. Any photography at all, really, requires a camera. And so it went with this shot: the only reason I was able to capture this scene is because I had my camera with me. I was on my way to my son’s high school cross country meet about an hour away, about ten minutes behind the team bus and just kind of enjoying the early morning drive when I looked to the east and saw the horizon positively glowing as the sun crested the line of tree-covered hills in the distance. I didn’t know if it would even be possible to capture the magnificence of the scene but I thought I might as well at least give it a try.
I pulled off on a dirt road and drove a couple hundred yards down the deep red tracks left by other cars that had traveled the same path, my tires kicking up rusty splotches of mud against the side of my car. A minute later I pulled off on a patch of brown grass, got out my Nikon D500 with 70-200mm f/2.8 lens–my favorite combination for getting photos of the cross country team–and fired off a couple shots of the sunrise. The sun was so dim that even at f/2.8 I was getting an exposure of 1/80 second at ISO 1800; a smaller aperture would have been better for overall depth of field, but not great for shutter or ISO. The crop sensor D500 is ideal for sports and action, but definitely not my first choice for landscapes or any kind of low light situation.
I got about a dozen photos at various focal lengths, and in the end was pretty happy with this one at 112mm. (Again, on a crop sensor so you figure about 155mm or so full-frame.) Lightroom Denoise did an incredible job of cleaning up the, what in my mind was a pretty excessive amount of noise, and a couple other manual tweaks to color, saturation, etc., resulted in the image you see here. It was a fun photo to take of a scene that doesn’t really seem like Oklahoma, but does go to show that there’s more to this state than people might realize :)
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