June was the first month this year that I had no travel plans so I challenged myself to wake up everyday at around 5am to capture the sunrise on downtown Chicago. I'm pretty proud I was able to wake up 29 of the 30 days at such and early hour of the day. Each shot you see in the video is in sequential order. 9 of the 30 days Mother Nature did not cooperate and provided either rain or heavy overcast skies. As a result, those days were left out since the captured footage wasn't much to look at.

I used two cameras with a number of different lenses. A Canon 7D and an old Canon Rebel directly connected to a laptop. Unfortunately, the Rebel had some dirty sensor issues so some shots are not perfect. The majority of the shots were taken every 5 to 10 seconds and then stitched together as a sequence using Quicktime Pro at 60 fps. The final edit was done in Sony Vegas Movie Studio.

I wish the final render was better. Too many random chunks of compression. Maybe my way of rendering the original QuickTime into a AVCHD Mpeg2 video was a horrible idea. It's never let me down in the past. Any advice?

What's next?
- I would like to setup a camera that is never touched and capture the exact same shot at the exact same settings every day.
- Another version I would like to setup at a different location in the city each day.

Music: Spark Mountain by umber
soundsofumber.co.uk