The prettiest thing… | McGowan Images Blog

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The prettiest thing…

As wedding photographers, we’re blessed to get to take pictures of beautiful things for a living. That’s just kind of the nature of weddings… beautiful things are part of the equation. We really take pride in being able to convey the beauty of a moment, or an object, or a relationship to people who couldn’t be there to see it in real life.

But every once in a while, we see something, and just know we can’t possibly do anything to convey that beauty. Maybe somebody could, but not us. It’s ok to just admit that we can’t… we’re not that good. The last 6 months, as we’ve been getting up before dawn three mornings a week for our boot camp, we’ve seen more sunrises than we ever had before in our lives. And in seeing God’s handiwork over again every morning, we kept talking about how we really wished we could capture that and share it with people.

We’ve taken still pictures, and Instagram got most of those. Some of them are really gorgeous. But even then, they pale in comparison to the real thing, in real life.

We decided to try and do a little time-lapse photography and see if maybe adding in the subtle changes, the second-by-second variations in a gorgeous sunrise, would accurately portray it’s beauty. It involved Mack standing out in the cold before even the least little bit of light seeped across the horizon, and painstakingly adjusting the focus and exposure of 1,200 shots in 90 minutes. Quite the little project.

Is it perfect? No. Ultimately, it doesn’t look exactly like the sunrise, because a photograph never can. Pictures are always, no matter WHO the photographer is, just a pale reflection of what happened in real life. But man, this is still really really beautiful. And I’m grateful that on cloudy days, on rainy days, on cold days, and on days when I just sleep past the sunrise, I can watch this and be reminded that no matter what’s going on, we live in a world that is SO FULL of beautiful things.

  1. Angie says:

    SO COOL! I love it – so beautiful 🙂

  2. Misty says:

    That was so so SOOOOOOOO WONDERFUL!!!!!!!!!!!! THANK YOU both for getting up so early and working on such an inspired project! One of my fave things y’all have ever done!!! <3

  3. Carman says:

    Beautiful!

  4. Mandaroo says:

    Isn’t God amazing! Great job…that was beautiful!

  5. Abby says:

    This is wonderful! We serve a beautiful, artistic, MAJESTIC God. We are blessed to be the audience to one of these to start every morning, an an equally incredible sunset to finish out every day! Thank you for sharing this with us… (p.s. you need to come shoot one of these from my floor at Children’s, there is one room that has a perfect view of the Dallas skyline and the sunrise between the buildings is truly magnificent.)

  6. Ram says:

    Stunning. Awesome pay-off for such a bold committment.

  7. Amber B. says:

    Wow that’s amazing!! So beautiful.

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