My mornings usually start around 4:30am. People often freak out when they find out this info. It's a choice but it's not. It seems my body's natural rhythm is to wake at that time no matter what time I went to bed. So eventually I just stopped fighting it and finally going to bed at a time that made waking at that hour livable. Don't get me wrong, I love the mornings and I am so glad I have more of them that most people. Im the kinda person who prefers at least two hours of waking time before having to head out the door for work or other similar activities. TWO HOURS!!  Yes, two hours. I've come to realize that TIME is huge in my life. If I am in a rush I am never the person I want to be. I've spent my 30s trying to evolve into a more loving and patient human. I have found not running late is the biggest factor in that. Getting up early serves me very well in this endeavor. When you wake up at 4:30am there isn't much happening and not too many other people I know are awake. Which gives me the glorious opportunity to capture the sunrise often.

Today July 29th 2019, I had set my alarm for 5am, woke around 4:12, eventually
got out of bed around 4:20. Made coffee, did some dishes and picked up some stuff that was still laying around from the weekend fun. One of my many blessings is living in the Rogers Park Neighborhood of Chicago, which is just a short 10 minute walk to the beach. Another one of my great blessings is that I have a few neighborhood friends who also get up early to enjoy the sunrise. Rob sent a message to our sunrise group at 4:39 seeing who else was up. I gathered my camera stuffs together and made my togo coffee and headed out the door. I used to go down an hour before sunrise, now I go down maybe 20 minutes before. I generally do timelapses of sunrise like this one. Which I try to post on my website but sometimes they only make it to facebook. I used to post them on linkedIn also but fell out of that habit unfortunately. There is so much posting and social media-ing now that has to be done as a photographer it is overwhelming. I didn't become a photographer to spend all my time on social media promoting my work. I became a photographer to do the work of capturing images. It's a never ending struggle to do enough of the social media to survive and thrive doing what I love. In an attempt to blog more I am going to try and start posting some of my sunrise timelapses on the blog regularly. I started a youtube channel a few years ago but have also lost the gusto with that. I'm thinking about making videos about the making of timelapses to put on the youtube channel. Is that something you all would like to see?