Chasing the Last Light

May 2019. The sky showed off and I was there for it.

May 2019.

Every photographer I know has a sickness, and here is mine: I cannot watch a good sky from inside the house. The light starts doing something at the window and my feet are already moving. Stephanie can tell you. The camera lives by the door for a reason.

This frame is what the sickness buys you. The whole sky went magenta and orange like it was trying to outdo itself, the horizon went black, and for about four minutes the world looked like a painting somebody left out in the rain — colors running into each other, nothing where it was supposed to be, all of it beautiful.

Four minutes. That is the whole show. Miss it and you get a gray Tuesday.

People think the photograph is the sunset. It is not. The photograph is being outside when it happened.

There will be another one tomorrow, and it will not look like this one. That is the entire reason I keep going out. The sky has never once repeated itself for me, and I do not expect it to start.