Back in the day, I owned a house that overlooked the Pacific Ocean. On fine evenings, when the sky was properly ornamented with clouds, I would put my video camera out on the deck and videotape the sunsets. I don't live there any more and gave up on my sunset videos because I didn't think the ones out here in Tierrasanta were all that special.
I'm rethinking that.
This week it rained and after rains, the clouds are just right. They're sculpted and healthy, with just the right amount of sky in between them. During the day yesterday, I perched my Kodak Zi8 on the railing in our backyard with one of those bendable claw tripods and let it run until the battery died. It went for 35 minutes. Using Adobe Premiere, I condensed it down to 90 seconds and added a soundtrack in YouTube. Later, it became obvious that the sunset was glorious on the ocean, but properly framed, a video out here could have captured drama and beauty, too.
I guess sometimes you have to look for beauty. It won't always be standing in front of you, yelling.
Enjoy.
2 comments:
I agree completely. "Beautiful scenes" are just the ones where the beauty happens to be in the direction that our eyes are naturally positioned to look, and so it can't be missed. But if that view is lacking, there is always up to the sky and stars[1], or down and close-up to the ground[2].
[1] "So, how far can you see?" "Well, I can just make out the Great Spiral in Andromeda over there, so I guess I can see for about 2.5 million light-years tonight"
[2] If you look at a pile of sand in bright light under a 10x magnifying glass, it looks like a mountain of gemstones.
The most spectacular sunsets I've ever experienced were in Tucson. Dry dusty air is the trick! Fantastic glow from all the particulates.
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