Nothing Like a Fiery Sunset

I will never tire of a brilliant sunset, either of just sitting (or standing for that matter) and enjoying the color show God gives us at night or of taking photos of a good sunset. Sunsets have always been one of my favorite photography subjects and they always will, though I do find myself much pickier in what I find to be a great sunset photo anymore. Some of my old favorites seem less than inspiring as I look back at them. But I guess that comes with the territory of being an artist and your own worst critic (when it comes to my photos at least).

In fact, as I was typing this post up I saw what looked to be a great looking sunset and dropped the computer, got in the car and drove down the road to the vantage point I was thinking would work well for an impromptu photograph. Well, this was one of those good idea, bad idea moments... Good idea: Drop everything and take a photo of a nice sunset. Bad idea: Leave wearing only slippers and park off the road in a soft muddy spot next to a tulip field... Well, as you can imagine I totally got stuck in my front wheel drive Saturn (thank the Lord someone helped push me out!) and caked my slippers in mud at the same time. Oops!! That will be a fun story for my wife when she returns from her ladies group tonight!!

So anyway, back to sunsets... I recently finished uploading a group of some of my still favorite sunset photos (with one sunrise in there) to my Flickr account for your enjoyment.  These photos make up a new set dedicated to Sunsets and Sunrises. The one photo featured in tonight's blog post was taken on New Year's Day at Fort Casey in Washington State. This sunset was one of the most brilliant I had ever seen and only continued to get better and better the longer we were there. My brother-in-law and I spent about 20-30 minutes taking photos that night and the colors continued to intensify with each passing minute - it truly was a spectacular sight we were blessed with that night. With the featured photo below the small portion of concrete in the very bottom of the frame looks very similar to the water seen in the bulk of the photo, something I think really adds to the photo.

Next time I'll be wearing real shoes or avoiding the mud!

Blessings,

Jesse