Sunsets Are Boring

"Look at that sunset, Truman. It's perfect. -Yeah." - The Truman Show

Loaf Made is a slow-moving, high-quality chronicle by a photographer who takes travel, film, books, print, leisure, and craft seriously — or at least seriously enough to write about them.

Free subscribers receive three posts a month.

Paid subscribers ($5/month) get an additional members-only post each month, plus four original fine art prints mailed out quarterly throughout the year — one per season.

If you’d like to support the work, a paid subscription is the price of a coffee and comes with something you can hold in your hands.

---

Sunsets Are Boring

People always say don’t take anything for granted, live every day like it’s your last. Good advice, impossible to follow on a daily basis. Some days just go by without critical thought, or a worthy observation. That’s life.

I’ve had a long standing creative battle with my home base. I live in the South Bay of Southern California, close to the beach. It’s more or less perfect, beautiful, an amazing place to live. And I haven’t been able to find a project here, or even a single image worth the time. I’m always looking for an excuse to go far and wide, chasing whatever pulls at the creative heartstrings. Meanwhile I ignore what’s in front of me, or if not ignore, struggle to find curiosity in it, after twenty-nine years of being around.

I’ve decided to change that. An experiment: find beauty and curiosity at home. Go back to basics. Make it different. Make it interesting. Or at least attempt to.

Sunsets.

The earth’s daily, naturally occurring beauty, unless you live far enough north that the sun never sets, in which case that’s your problem, not mine. My whole life I’ve taken sunsets for granted. Most people do, especially when there’s a beautiful one almost every night. The pastels, the glow, the radiance…boring.

At least that’s how I’ve acted, whether or not I ever thought it consciously. Sunsets have always been a staple of photography, chasing the good light. So I figured what better place to start than the most basic, daily subject.

I’ll experiment with strange camera settings, angles, formats, everything. Once I’ve made an image I think is worthy of note, I’ll move on to the next target.

I’ve pulled together a few quotes i’ve come across, on sunsets, to make this post a little more dramatic, a little more thought provoking. And below, my first four experimental shots. Many more to come. The goal, I suppose, is the opposite of boring. Mesmerizing, maybe.

“Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a west as distant and as fair as that into which the Sun goes down. He appears to migrate westward daily and tempt us to follow him. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays.” - Henry David Thoreau, Walking essay

“Have you ever seen anything in your life more wonderful than the way the sun, every evening, relaxed and easy, floats toward the horizon and into the clouds or the hills, or the rumpled sea, and is gone” - Mary Oliver’s, The Sun Poem

“This (the sunset) more resembled an explosion. It took place above and behind him, and he turned some of the time to regard it: it (the sunset)” -David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“go to that place by yourself, watch the sunset and don’t rush home.” - Anthony Bourdain in a clip from one of his episodes of No Reservations.

---