Cellpic Sunday – 14 February 2021

Buckeye, Arizona.

Regular readers know of my love of Arizona sunsets and my regular trips to the desert a couple miles from our house to photograph them. Well, I missed the trip to the desert for one spectacular sunset. You see last week was Superbowl Sunday. Of course, I had to watch it. By half-time, the game was all but decided and though it was no longer interesting, I sat and watched like some robot.

My wife was paying less attention to the game and happened to glance out our patio door. Excited, she told me I needed to step outside to look at the sunset. Our patio is on the west end of the house, so I ventured outside the patio door to be greeted by this lavender, orange, red, and gold sky.

About the photo: Putting my Samsung S20U to work, I captured several images of a sky that was too big for the camera to take it all in. I loaded the images into Lightroom and used the Panorama merge tool to join two photos that showed the bulk of the clouds that were illuminated by the sun so low on the horizon. After a few tweaks in Lightroom, I sent it off to Luminar AI for final touches. That beautiful sky didn’t need much, I just applied some exposure masking along and below the fence line to darken the areas that were drawing attention away from the sky. If your browser allows, click on the image to enlarge it and put it on a dark background.

John Steiner

16 comments

  1. Some of the most glorious sunrises and sunsets are those I remember from New Mexico. There was one place, on a hill from Santa Fe to Albuquerque called La Bajada….I used to often pull off the road just to watch the sunset. Just incredible.

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