A Bitter Cold Sunset

I'd spent all day indoors when the evening drew near and I decided I wanted to go outside and actually do something.

I had recently gotten an adapter that allowed me to use two of my dad's old film lenses on my Nikon, and I hadn't yet had a chance to go try them out anywhere than around my house. So, naturally I decided to go try out the lenses for some sunset pictures. 

At this point, I hadn't seen the temperature outside and the sun was casting such a warm glow on everything that I thought it had to be warm out. So I asked my mom if she wanted to go down the park with me. I could have walked, but with my heavy camera bag and a tripod, walking down a highway for twenty minutes seemed like a bad idea.

I took one step outside and immediate came back to change into warmer clothes.

After collecting my camera and lenses, putting on an embarrassingly huge jacket, and grabbing a tripod, me and my mom headed for the park.

When we got there, the sun was just starting to set behind the trees and I set up by the lake to get some pictures. I was already freezing and it had only been five minutes so I decided this would probably be a short shoot. 

After taking a few landscape shots, some Canadian geese decided to take a swim and I immediately saw my chance to try out my dad's telephoto lens. I grabbed the lens and started shooting pictures of the geese. If you've ever photographed birds, you'll know that they can move very fast, making it difficult to photograph them. Now add the crippling fact that I only had the ability to use manual focus because of the older lens. 

I shot hundreds of photos of those birds and still there were very few that I was even slightly happy with. In the end, out of hundreds of images, there was only one that I felt was actual worth keeping. Which is actually how photography works much of the time. You spend hours shooting hundreds or thousands of pictures and choose only one or two in the end.

After about an hour and a half, my mom was freezing, I was freezing, and the sun had set completely.

We finally decided to leave, and as I was packing up my stuff and heading for the car, a man approached us. He was apparently the owner of the bait shop that was literally right next to where I was shooting.

"Hey! I saw you were shooting some pictures of the sunset here," he started.

Being the anti-social person I am, I just nodded.

"Yeah, lots of people come here to do photography at sunset. They usually set up on that little dock over there," he said while pointing at a dock a few yards away.

I nodded again. I'd shot on that dock several times myself.

He pulled out his phone and swiped onto a Facebook page before holding it up. "This was yesterdays sunset," he explained. "A photographer shot it right on that dock."

My eyes nearly fell out when I saw the image. Yesterday had been a stormy, cloudy, cold, rainy day and I hadn't seen anything near as colorful a sunset through my window. "Wow, that's amazing," I said.

My mom was looking too at this point. "Oh wow! That's so beautiful."

"Yeah." He put his phone in his pocket. "Anyway, I just thought I'd show it to you. But yeah, that dock is a great place to shoot."

"Okay thanks!"

We headed home after that, thus ending the trip and beginning about an hour's time of sorting through and editing images.