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Sunset Nouveau
23 November 2020
Every sunset is new. Never before. Never again. Unique. Unreproducible (as many an aspiring photographer has discovered to their dismay). But, fortunately, interpretable. You start with a judicious capture and use your software to work back to what you remember seeing and sometimes, even, beyond.
Sunset Nouveau. Nikon D200 with 43-86mm Nikkor at 50mm, f8, 1/60 second and ISO 200. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw.
As unique as each sunset is, it's also a very fleeting moment. Look away and what you saw is gone. Run for a camera and what charmed you has disappeared.
The longer you linger over this image, the less real it is. Because in real life, it would already have changed.
If it's been a while since we shared with you what a sunset over the Pacific Ocean looks like from our picture window, it's only because we don't see many in the summer. And this fall, while we've shown you ashes from wildfires floating over the Pacific, we haven't seen anything as reassuring as this in a while.
But Sunday night we did. So we jumped up, got the nearest dSLR and took a few shots. This was the first.
We liked the colors. The gold of the setting sun behind the trees, reflected in the surf, the cloud formations gradating from orange to violet, the pale blue sky, the silhouette of the foreground. It was a festival of color, a circus of hues, a theater of tonality.
And in the blink of an eye, it was gone. We put the camera down, turned on the kitchen lights and started pounding chicken breasts into scaloppine for dinner.
That wasn't bad either.