Sunset : Sept 9th 2010

Beautiful sunsets are rare, more so if you have a desk job and no window. Most windows face another window. I feel fortunate that all I need to do, most times, to watch the sunset, is lift my head and turn it to the right and there it is – if I manage to catch it in time. No matter how many sunsets we’ve seen and no matter where we have viewed them from, the colors of the sky at that hour make us want to believe in magic.

Whenever I do have the fortune of witnessing a colorful & dramatic sunset, I don’t always have a camera around and sometimes, that is just as well. Even when I do have the camera, I just want to stand there, with one hand resting on the balcony railing, staring at the entire sky, sweeping my eyes this way and that, breathing as if I’m catching my last gulp of air before I go under. It is as if some primal instinct wants me to just soak it all in one go; as if at the molecular level, my body knows, this sunset will not come again.

For more from the same day by two other photographers, see here on Facebook for @ashumittal’s captures and here on Flickr for Shivali Chopra a.k.a. @crajeeshelly’s capture.

I sometimes crib that the building behind my house takes away all advantages of being on the fourth floor for me – I can never see the horizon. I’ve tried to make it work in my sunset photographs by using the water tank and top of the building as silhouettes and sometimes, it works well.