Photo Journal/ A-Z Photo Challenge: S is for Sunset

It’s Tuesday once again, time for Frizztext’s A-Z Photo Challenge. Letter this week is S and our featured photographer, Blanche Berzamin-Acabado has chosen the theme Sunset. Inspired as I was by the images, I thought of pairing it with lovely quotes as is our wont in our Photo Journal section. Hope you enjoy them. Here are a few of Blanche’s lovely photographs.

“It is almost impossible to watch a sunset and not dream.” – Bern Williams

I often hear people say that sunsets are beautiful and very inspiring. They are so beautiful and inspiring that many poems and songs were written about them. However, I have failed to see and appreciate the beauty of sunsets. Like many people busy with their lives, I was unable to just stop and look at the setting sun, marvel at its beauty and be inspired. That is until I took up photography.

When you start taking pictures, you try your hand at taking pictures of almost anything. Most of all, you take pictures of things that are already beautiful. You do this because you realize that as a beginner, the best way to come up with beautiful pictures is to take photographs of beautiful things. So you look around and look for wonderful things. And, yes, when you stop and look, you will see that sunsets are one of the most beautiful things you will ever see.

So, after photographing my very first sunset in 2009, I never stopped. Every time a particular sunset gets my attention, I try to stop and capture it with my camera. Luckily, I have lived and been to places that give off spectacular sunsets. In the past three years, I have collected quite a few sunset images and I would like to share with you what I think are my best ones. Here they are and I hope you will like them as much as I do.

Shades of Sunsets

Sunset in Waikiki Beach, Hawaii (2009)

“Twilight fell: The sky turned to a light, dusky purple littered with tiny silver stars.”
― J.K. Rowling

Sunset in Halong Bay, Vietnam (2009)

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds

Sunset in Waikiki Beach, Hawaii (2010)

“A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Sunset in Kuhio Beach, Hawaii (2010)

“If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.”
― G.K. Chesterton

Sunset in Guam (2010)

“This land, although not my native land,
Will be remembered forever.
And the sea’s lightly iced,
Unsalty water.

The sand on the bottom is whiter than chalk,
The air is heady, like wine,
And the rosy body of the pines
Is naked in the sunset hour.

And the sunset itself on such waves of ether
That I just can’t comprehend
Whether it is the end of the day, the end of the world,
Or the mystery of mysteries in me again.”
― Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems

Sunset in Guam (2010)

“This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children’s eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea–if you gazed intently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flappers and Philosophers

Sunset in Guam (2010)

“Outside, daylight was bleeding slowly toward dusk.”
― Stephen King, The Running Man

Sunset in Guam (2011)

“Limitless undying love which shines around me like a million suns it calls me on and on across the universe.”
― John Lennon

Sunset in Waikiki Beach, Hawaii (2011)

“Here I came to the very edge
where nothing at all needs saying,
everything is absorbed through weather and the sea,
and the moon swam back,
its rays all silvered,
and time and again the darkness would be broken
by the crash of a wave,
and every day on the balcony of the sea,
wings open, fire is born,
and everything is blue again like morning. ”
― Pablo Neruda

Sunset in Guam (2012)

“One day,’ you said, ‘I watched the sunset forty-three times!’

And a little later you added:
‘You know, when one is that sad, one can get to love the sunset.’

‘Were you that sad, then, on the day of the forty-three sunset?’

But the prince made no answer.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince