Sunrise, Sunset

While driving to check on a friend's cats the other day, I had to leave late into the evening and as I was beginning my journey down the road I looked skyward. There I saw, against a grayish background, dusty rose colored clouds spread across the sky. As I got closer to town, I saw to the west a break in the clouds and a thin strip of faded warm yellow sky, clear and turning orange. Gazing back to the clouds trying to stay on my side of the road, I noticed that they were gradually turning into a foreboding blood red color. When I reached town the sky had turned to night and I continued on my way.

One of the most common things one can find is a picture of a sunrise or a sunset. It's a shared phenomenon all around the world and it was of those experiences that we know that people of the past had witnessed in much the same way that we do today: the rising or falling sun changing the color of the sky. Images of these events have even eked their way into the art world, usually in amateur photography shows. This, however, does not make the picture any less stunning, nor the event itself. It does make the more unique pictures harder to find.

I know that each and every image of the sun rising or setting in plainly stunning, and the memory of one who was there to witness makes a particular image all the better to them. There does have to come a point when someone who's looked over all the images says, "Ho Hum I've seen all this before." What do we do about that person? While pleasing one person out of the few billion who sees the image seems a bit pointless, it is a challenge that is part of the exercise.

Sunrises and sunsets are some of the most beautiful events in nature, and they define a day for many of us, so we have the change to see them thousands and thousands of times in our lives. With digital cameras we can even begin to record some of the better ones. In fact if we record and share the better ones we can begin to discover some truly amazing places to see a sunrise and a sunset. A couple off the top of my head is on the waterfront of your closest ocean, and in the mountains of Nepal. While I have not seen a sunrise or sunset from the mountains of Nepal, I'm sure that it is spectacular, because of the vastness both above and below the viewer.

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