These are pictures of a hay meadow taken on my morning walk, leading up to 7am. Since I am a set-on-auto/point/click sort of photographer, they do make the land look rather dark, which it wasn’t, of course, because it was light long before the sun peeked over the horizon.

Slightly more obvious that it’s light when I’m not pointing directly at the sun.

Theoretically this was period of twilight or dusk leading up to sunrise. The same terms applied to the period after sunset. But twilight always suggests a dimness, light fading, or just growing, and that only applies to the very start or end of the period when the sun is out of sight but its light is there, but colours are bleached out. Twilight should be confined to that really awkward period when really stupid drivers in grey or dusty cars think they can still see well enough…