The sunsets early last week were stunning. Wednesday evening we had nothing on the calendar around dusk, so we took a field trip over to South Mountain, the largest municipal park in the country. It’s not far from here, and there’s one trail in particular that the three of us have hiked many many times.
I went up to the second summit, while Climbing Daddy and Rocket Kid continued on to complete the two-mile loop.
Before we parted ways, Rocket Kid had a vista he wanted me to take a shot of. I did, but with a lot of dust in the air the mountains were hazy and it wasn’t a great shot. So we played with the settings and ended up with one that is, according to Rocket Kid, really cool. What do you think?
The colors were not as amazing as they’d been the evening before, of course, but they were still pretty good.
The weather was perfect.
At one point, I sat down on the ground to get a better angle of a plant against the sky (have you noticed I love silhouettes?), and a light breeze kicked up. I was annoyed, because I can’t take a shot of this type of plant while it’s moving in the breeze—it’ll be blurry.
Thankfully reality kicked in fairly quickly. I was sitting alone on a mountaintop in close proximity to where I live. The weather was gorgeous, the sky was gorgeous, it was quiet and peaceful. It didn’t really matter if I got the shot.
The sky came out nicely, even if the plant isn’t as sharp as I would have liked. Or maybe, as a friend said, the photo is better this way.
On my way back down, I stopped to take a few shots of the lights of the city. None were particularly shareworthy. But I decided to take some long-exposure to try to get light trails from all of the visible traffic. At first I was lazy and tried to do it without a tripod, knowing it wouldn’t work but trying anyway. It didn’t work, but the result is actually pretty fun.
100 Days of Art begins one week from today. If you enjoy my photography—and I assume you do if you’ve gotten this far—you’ll enjoy this project. The quick-and-dirty: every day for 100 days, I’ll email you a piece of visual art. Could be a photo I took that day, could be a photo I took in the past but am just playing with in Photoshop now, could be a snapshot of a sketch or painting I just did. It’s all current work, and it’s all going to be exclusively in the emails—none here on Sundays, none on social media.
Click the link and join now so you don’t forget later. Your inbox is full of retail and bills and receipts—why not have something in there to look forward to?