Happy Sunday! I have taken this shot many times over the last 8 years on my annual visit to San Diego. I spend most of each day at the Mission Bay Marina Village Conference Center talking optics with prospective ZEISS owners and one of the highlights of the day (no pun intended) is sunset over the marina. This year I have a new tool to apply, since I have begun to actively experiment with HDR. The hard part of a sunset shot is holding any kind of realistic detail in the foreground while capturing the subtle shades and brilliant hues of dominant sky. HDR helps.

Canon SX20IS at about 60mm equivalent field of view, three bracketed exposures centered on –2/3 EV, assembled and tone-mapped in Photomatix pro, processed for intensity and clarity in Lightroom.

And here we take the closer view, which is even more of challenge for the sensor.

And, since it is Sunday: we love sunsets…sunsets and dawns when the sky takes fire move the most self-centered of us to an appreciation, to an apprehension, of the beauty of nature. But there is something deeper there…sunsets stir something in our souls…we feel them, as much as see them…we are moved. There is a longing in the time between times (as the Celts would say), a yearning, an opening to something other and beyond ourselves. I am not a believer in magic, but I can believe more fully in miracles at sunset. The sunset has to witnessed either with silence or with song…with contemplation or with praise…with supplication and with hope. It is in the truest sense, a holy time. Is it any wonder the camera sensor struggles to capture it…