Songdo Sunrise

Sunrises are new to me.  I've seen probably eight in my whole life and three of those are in the last month.  Despite the fact that there are no coffee or donut shops open before ten a.m., Korea is bustling as the sun rises.  Fishermen line the docks, men and women wander the paths along the shore, some with the intensity of an early morning workout, some with the languor of a night they can't figure out how to end.  I leave my house expecting to spend the morning alone, and I end up surrounded by people.  While I generally have no business on a pier at five in the morning with a group of fisherman, my camera feels like an invitation to an experience I wouldn't normally have.  The fishermen, the walkers and joggers, the stragglers, and the rest, are hyper-aware of my presence, yet have no problem ignoring me.  I stood on a pier for twenty minutes shooting this group of fisherman and not a single one even made eye contact with me.  I didn't exactly feel welcome, but I felt tolerated.  That somehow made me feel a kinship; the fishermen were there to catch something, and so was I.  Fish, the first rays of sunlight, we'd all gotten up at three, four in the morning, packed our gear, drug ourselves to our cars, driven the dark streets, and found this place.  The sun rose, they caught their fish and I caught this.  Or these.  All of this is to say that sunrise is becoming something I look forward to, something I regret missing.  

For the first time in a long time, I'm not pushing out 10 pictures.  I just couldn't get enough variety to make it to ten.  Comments though, always comments.

I didn't plan on shooting from this dock, but I'm glad I did.  I was standing on the concrete snapping pictures of the fisherman as the sky started to change colors, thinking, this'll be great, the sun will come up over those smoke stacks.  And then the sun started to come up, seemingly from the end of the pier, so big and red it looked like I could reach out and touch it.  I literally went "Haul," which is Korean for something like, "Shiiiiittttt."

I don't know about other places, but the sunrise here feels really short.  Like, twenty, thirty minutes.  The sky goes from a weird night-time purple, to the grey block of most days really fast.  

These guys were also out on the pier taking pictures, though they did not have DSLR's and tripods, but camera phones.  They did say hello to me, before they walked away giggling and shooting pictures of me shooting pictures of them.

This is one of those pictures where I really just want to make a version of somebody else's cool picture.  So, here's my version of rocks and water and sunrise.

There we go, the sun coming up right at the end of the dock.  Crazy lucky.

This needs an inspirational quote to go on top of it.  

I didn't stick around to figure out why this guy looked so wrecked.

These guys were serious about the fishing.  No shooting the shit, no messing around, just fishing.