When the sky is clear it turns reddish or orange long before sunrise. This morning the sun was supposed to rise 4.35 (or 4.34) and I was down at the shore around 4.20. A few light clouds above the horizon were shining bright while the horizon was turning brownish red. The moment when the first slice the bright red sun disc appeared above the horizon I had already turned off my camera. It cannot record the colours of such a strong light. Actually I can only capture the moment of expectation or anticipation before sunrise. After all those grey mornings it nevertheless feels nice to actually see the sun.
 
Yesterday was the first warm day for weeks, the beginning of summer, or so it felt. People were walking in sandals and T-shirts and everybody was out by the shore. There was probably a party in the park for most of the night, because I could still hear some voices from the mainland across the water. And a car driving along the shore playing load music with headlights on sounded like Saturday night rather than Sunday morning.
 
Regarding these mornings I am more than half way through now; approximately ten more days to get up at dawn until the exhibition. I wonder if the aspen will have leaves before it is time to finish. The buds are swelling, slowly, but compared to all the other trees and bushes, they are exceptionally slow. When I chose to include branches of aspen in the image I thought of the possibility to follow the development of the buds, but I could not imagine they would need so much more time than the other trees. In one warm day the leaves of the birches and rowans have visibly grown, and now the old bird cherries on the slope have big leaves and flower buds too. On the mainland some of the bird cherries are already blooming, and in a few days they will probably turn into white flowering clouds on the island as well.
 
Yesterday I transferred the first part of the material onto my computer, but did not do anything about it yet. To begin with I planned to add a black sequence for those mornings I have been away, but now it seems slightly superfluous. It is probably not important to emphasize an exact record; these are only some mornings in May. The main question is probably how long takes I should use, and whether they should be of equal length or not. Some mornings I have recorded only a few minutes and some mornings, like yesterday and today, I have more than ten minutes of material to choose from.
 
The other question is, what to do with the sound? Normally I use a very rough 100% recording as the sound, as it is, and more often than not the wind dominates the sound scape. This time the birds probably dominate in most images. I would not add any music, but I could write a text and read it as a voice over, I guess. Right now it does not seem like a good idea, but of course it could be a way to add a human presence. It is way of “adding content”, as it were, and as such perhaps stupid or unnecessary in this case. The shifting colours should be the main thing.