Happy Hour

I call this ocean sunset photography print Happy Hour. Unless a photographer is out at some exotic location with majestic mountains or a raging sea, it’s hard to get a dramatic photo – but the nice thing about sunsets is that something beautiful usually happens anyway. One evening at Elwood Beach, there wasn’t much to photograph – no boats, no clouds, only a few people off in the distance. It seemed like a pretty dull evening, with no way to get an exotic shot. But as the sun set, the whole sky lit up and the light began reflecting off the water. Small waves appeared in the fading light, a boat showed up on the horizon, and someone walked into the sun’s reflection, forming a lovely silhouette – all in the last few minutes before the light was gone.
I’m probably too philosophical, because I tend to find meaning in everything. There’s something about a sunset that closes out one cycle and prepares for the next. I took this shortly before I moved back to America to start a new phase of life, and it’s hard not to see it now as a marker of that ending – and the beginning that followed.