There’s nothing better than slow moving light that turns everything gold and warm, especially in small coastal towns where the rough sea meets rocky beaches. The regular opacarophile might love every sunset, but I fear that not every sunset is so easily framed as to be visually interesting. Maybe I’ve just seen too many sunsets? Maybe too much time spent looking through the viewfinder considering settings turns the mind to a need to make every photo a winner? I suspect the latter is closer to the truth and is a story all it’s own.

Another sunset and another horizon. How to make this one something different? How to avoid the same bright sun and carefully placed horizon line composition?

I filled the frame with the orange glow of the sun just as that bright sphere dipped out of sight. The Finepix S200 EXR is an old camera and is quite soft at the long end, but who needs sharpness for the photo above? It’s all about the colour field and the deep orange glow. Underexposing by two-thirds of a stop deepened the colours. Everything is smeared to a sunset abstraction to fill the frame.

Minutes later, I caught a line of rough dark clouds marking the transition from golden hour to blue hour: