From our deck

I am fortunate to live here.

On this morning's run I was looking for an image to portray the week's subject 'tired'. Actually was very pleased with one picture I took. Then off to the office for the day, and was myself tired by this evening, after we had jointly done the first supermarket visit for a couple of weeks.

Together the wonderful S and I prepared a meal which we took onto the deck of our apartment and I watched the sun inch closer to the horizon in the west. Eventually the sun was too bright to look westwards, and then very quickly it disappeared below the horizon. For almost three quarters of an hour I was taking photos. Changed the lenses on the Pentax. Switched from manual to auto focus and back again. Moved to different places on the deck. Shot a picture of the very pink eastern sky; the west was molten gold, with turquoise, grey, and black strips. Over twenty photos of this magnificent sunset, and I chose over all the others, this picture of what I could see as I walked out the doors onto the deck 30 minutes after I first started.

At the bottom of the picture is the top of the balustrade, over which can be seen houses in the valley below heading over to the upper Waitemata Harbour. The view is approximately northwest, and the colours in the sky are much softer than to the southwest; yet still dramatic. Particularly, I liked the upright V of the clouds appearing to reflect the inverted V of the roofline immediately below us.

I had the lens at 18mm, and the aperture was f/4.5 to as much as possible mimic what I saw. I included the frond of the palm in its tub, and the orchids towards the other side of the deck. The dark at the top is the underside of the deck of the apartment above us. (Minor cropping top and bottom to reduce the amount of black in the image).

The grand sunset pictures lacked the personal element of this image, hence my choice.