Color Burst

Some sunsets are loud. This one was not. I had been on the beach for over an hour when the color began—not with the drama I had been anticipating, but with a quiet gradual bloom of pink and gold at the horizon that spread slowly upward into an enormous sky made almost entirely of blue. The water, which had been rough all afternoon, had calmed into a long, glassy expanse. The wet sand at my feet held the whole sky in miniature below me.

I set up a long exposure and let the water soften completely—the waves losing their edges and becoming something continuous, a mirror that moved. The reflection of the sunset in the wet sand and in the water created a symmetry of color that felt almost impossible: warm in the lower right, cool and luminous in the upper left, the colors meeting and blending across the frame in long horizontal bands that the eye could follow from one edge to the other.

Color Burst is what happens when restraint and abundance arrive at the same time. The palette here is wide—there are blues and pinks and golds and purples all present—and yet nothing overcrowds. The image breathes. On a large metal print, it fills a wall with light rather than weight, and the luminosity of the wet sand at the horizon carries a warmth into the room that persists well past the first impression. This is the kind of piece you return to—and find something different each time.