The Artful Engineer

I love my new home in Colorado for a lot of reasons, but after living in Tucson for 29 years, there are a few things I really miss. We recently found a Mexican restaurant that makes us feel like we are in Arizona, so I think that issue is resolved. The two remaining biggies are monsoons and sunsets. Colorado, of course, does have epic thunderstorms—especially out on the plains—but it’s not quite the same thing. They don’t really have the same character, and in Arizona they are a late-summer respite from the brutality of early-summer heat. Regardless, I am willing to call the Arizona and Colorado summer storms different but equal; I like them both.

But when it comes to sunsets, oh dear. There really isn’t any comparison. It’s not that there aren’t great sunsets in Colorado over the Front Range, but there aren’t nearly as many of them. Like most places, Colorado has some sunsets that are worthy of remark. But in Arizona, it is the feeble sunset that is worthy of remark. And when a crazy sunset happens in Arizona, it is completely over the top. There is, after all, a reason that the Arizona state flag looks like this:

I did a little math and figured out that I had about 6,000 commute drives in Tucson over the years. An awful lot of those happened around the time of sunset, and I was often treated to spectacular displays of color as I drove home with no real opportunity to photograph them. Definitely a pity. (The same problem often happened during winter sunrises—for some reason the winter sunrises were often amazing in Tucson.) I don’t know for certain why Arizona has so many vibrant sunsets, but assume it is because there are a lot of particulates in the air from the expanse of desert to the west.

Given how many sunsets I witnessed, I have surprising few in my Lightroom catalog, although maybe part of the issue is that I haven’t tagged them all. Another part of the problem is that I have standards: since I know that a glorious sunset over a nasty gas station isn’t going to look good, I don’t bother. And on my commute the camera I usually had was an iPhone. My iPhone takes perfectly fine pictures most of the time, but sunsets are not one of those times: their penchant for cranking up the colors combined with an Arizona sunset usually results in a thermonuclear look.

Now that I look at these images—all from the Tucson area—I definitely see a theme: silhouetted mountain ranges:

I do have a lot of other sunsets behind silhouettes of saguaros and ocotillos and trees, too, but I am going to leave them for other posts. This next image is a favorite of mine. I love the narrow band of light below the ominously dark clouds, and even that is almost swallowed by the rain. It’s a sunset picture, but not a typical one.

For some reason I have heard a number of landscape photographers say that they either don’t photograph sunsets at all or that they don’t like to. Maybe they feel it is too easy or cheating or overdone or…I don’t know. I actually think that it is pretty challenging to make a good sunset image both from a technical and an artistic perspective. I hope that you have enjoyed these.