My mom sent me an email a week or so ago that showed a TON of snippets of videos of night skies in Oregon. It was extremely gorgeous. So stunning in fact that, that I decided I ought to do some sunrises. So I got my app store on and went hunting. I settled in Quick Lapse HD … it had good reviews and seemed easy enough to use. I plopped the ol’ iPhone in the window and hit record with settings of two images per second, compiling it at 20 frames per second … Essentially making it 10x faster than what you’d see in real life.

An hour later I came back to fetch my phone, which had been playing Pandora all the while (man I gotta do some karaoke to Mississippi Queen … if you know what I mean). The app rendered the sunrise exactly as I wanted it to. Undulating sine waves of morning clouds off of Lake Washington, birds trapped in the sky for fleeting moments before disappearing from the frame, a crescendo of color off on the horizon as the sun torched the sky.

Stunning. One of the best sunrises we’ve had in a while and I got it all condensed to a one minute clip.

Alas, as soon as the sun provided enough light to showcase how badly we need to clean our windows, it just focused on the grime, so the better part of the video is either popping in and out of focus or is just flat out blurry.

If only I could call the actors back to their marks for a second take sometime today. But I guess that’s what makes it beautiful and special, right?

Enjoy the “soft focus” sunrise. The clouds are still pretty amazing, despite being blurry.