on looking up
The very beginnings of my journey with photography have roots in capturing sunsets ans sunset skies.
I'd always been mesmerized by the art created in the sky each evening by the sun waving goodnight and the clouds making sure the same scene looks different each night.
Ever since I can remember whenever I went through some tough times I would always find peace, hope and a sense of relief (even if just for a little bit) when I looked at the sky, in particular the night sky and sunsets. Yes, sunsets, I know to many it sounds so ordinary, to other artists out there it may sound extremely amateur, but to me a sunset was neither of these things. Since I can remember I've always been able to find a good friend, (at times my only friend), in the setting Sun, (its reflection on the Moon and also the other, infinite number, of suns we can see in the night sky). The kind of a great friend who would hug you and make you feel better just by being there, one who would never judge and would always be there for you, one who’s seen it all and whose wisdom could shed some profound light on your life and help you see things from a different perspective. Whenever times got hard I would watch sunsets; and their beauty, overwhelming greatness and incredible, yet often overlooked, uniqueness would soothe me every time. Sometimes it would help me rethink things, sometimes take my mind off things. It often made me cry tears of utter happiness in the darkest times of my life because the thought of how blessed we all are to get to witness such beauty and power of nature every day, for free, no matter what would completely overwhelm me… and it still does.
When I was little I would often sit and ponder of the ways I could somehow capture a piece of the sky, capture that feeling, for myself and for others. I loved writing, but in the case of such visuals, however creative, writing was simply not enough. I didn’t think painting was really feasible given the fleeting nature of these kinds of moments, plus, I actually distinctively remember thinking that if I even managed to paint what I saw no one would believe it. And I wanted them to believe it- right away. I wanted you to know that nature actually created that and that you can see such things too, for real, almost anywhere, you just need to make it a point to look. More than that, I think I wanted to make sure that I myself believe it afterwards, years later, looking back at it, the way I'm looking at it all now. So I turned to photography. (That was way before we each had a camera and an overload of images at our fingertips).
My first photos of sunsets were taken by a regular film point-and-shoot camera, and I quickly realized this wasn't really working. I wanted to be able to zoom in and also access my images right away, so I dug up an old camcorder and took photos using its (ridiculously poor) capture feature. After a while the digital point-and-shoot cameras became more affordable and a few years later I was gifted my first DSLR whose image quality (incomparable to what we all have on our phones nowadays) blew me away.
One day I decided to do a project where I would capture sunsets every single evening (unless it was too cloudy or I absolutely had to miss it because of something really important). I did it for well over two years and then I allowed myself to become a little bit more flexible with it and would only capture the ones I deemed a bit more spectacular. In the meantime I also extended my subjects to other wonderful things up there, such as clouds themselves, the moon and (at first very poor attempts to capture) the night sky.
As you can imagine, I have a pretty huge archive of those shots, way too many to share, but here are some of my favorites from the years 2007 to 2013, here's also the album on my photography Facebook Page.
Not all of those photos are as magnificent as the feelings I experienced but some of them are quite beautiful and I thought they should be out there. They may not be the greatest photographs you’ve ever seen but to me they’re all kind of memories, little pieces of wonder, so I hope you’ll enjoy them even if only a little fraction of how much I enjoyed spending my time watching these marvels myself.
Mind you, I was just a kid back then, so it's not like I could travel to some breathtaking locations to capture gorgeous sunsets, these are all just from my walks, bike rides, bedroom windows, some hills and/or rooftops I managed to climb-- nothing special, but that only goes to show that you can see such wonders anywhere, you only need to cultivate the intention to actually look.
