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A fiery and intense sunset over the coast of Christmas Island. We were treated to two intense evenings, one on the first day of the trip and the second on our last day at Christmas Island, before flying out to Cocos Islands. This one was particularly spectacular and colours lingered for quite some time after the sun had gone down.
It also caught me out of the blue (or red) somewhat. We had planned to go to a couple of possible sunset locations on the west side of the island providing the roads were opened. Unfortunately they were still closed because of the baby crabs migration, so that changed our plans and we returned to the main settlement. Options here were a bit more limited. I did not want to reuse the motive of the old moorings at Flying Fish Cove (see previous photo), as I spent another evening photographing at that location. We also explored the coast around this area earlier during the trip but did not find anything too interesting to entice a return for sunset photography.
Because of all that, we decided to leave our camera gear at the hotel and to go for a relaxing stroll on our final evening. When we were walking, I started to notice the colours coming to life but I could not think of a decent composition and intended to just enjoy the show of nature. It was only then that we noticed other people walking out onto an elevated headland in a spot which we have not seen previously. We followed and once we got there, I immediately decided to make a mad dash back to the hotel to pick up my camera and tripod. Finding the rocks in the foreground suddenly opened up photographic possibilities and the conditions were just too great to ignore.
I ran from the hotel back to the discovered location with my camera bag in had and that was followed by fairly disorganised unpacking of the gear. As often happens in such rushed situations, things can go wrong very easily, and they usually do. I managed to get everything just about ready and once I fitted on the filter holder, I realised that I did not remove the polarising filter, which I usually keep on my lens. Normally that would not be a problem. However, because I also have a polarising filter on the filter holder, I double stacked the polarising filters on top of each other. This, again, would not be a problem as long as I could remove one or both of the filters but in this case the filters got jammed and stuck together, and no matter what I tried I could not remove any of the polarisers. It was a humid evening and my hands were sweating after running to get the camera which did not help the cause at all. I only noticed this mistake when I took a few early exposures and saw an unusual level of vignetting with very dark corners in each frame. I desperately kept trying to separate the filters but I was not able to even unscrew the entire filter setup from my lens. I did not want to damage the filter threads, and also I did not want the colours to fade away, so I just kept on shooting while hoping that I would be able to work with the files at home to at least some decent effect.
All in all, I had enough material to salvage and to put through my post processing routine. There was a bit of clean up necessary to fix the darkened corners and also to even out the exposure across the frame, especially as the sides of the image were a bit uneven in brightness due to the double polarising effect. Another side effect was the increased saturation in each photo. There was a heavy red cast present and I used a number of adjustment tools to reduce its presence in the foreground rocks without removing it completely as the red glow was present all around us on that evening. I did not mind that effect in the sky too much. It was a deep and fiery sunset and I was very happy with the cloud texture and dimension. I was also very glad to have found an interesting foreground, without which the mad rush and subsequent photos would not have happened in the first place.
The story probably sounds more dramatic than it was in reality. This is how I remember it though, and it is kind of fun to share various mishaps and struggles on my photographic journey. I am not sure whether I can pin this post under the current weekly theme of 'treasured', however, I treasure every moment I am out there with my partner seeing and exploring the world. Every sunrise and every sunset, no matter if they are spectacular or not. Ones like this one obviously stick in my mind for a lot longer, especially if I get to photograph them.
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