my first art was photography

There's only four years of my life I didn't play music, but before I pressed my first key on the ornamental organ decorating, cluttering my childhood home, I was a photographer.

My dad was one, his parents were professionals, so many of his 'back in my day' blurbs were about working events and developing prints between chores. He showed me pictures and how to pose before I could hold my head up myself (My mom was the stylist ofc). I remember watching him transition into digital, into Canon, and then into Nikon and editing as I grew up. (Early 2000s: filter overload)

Even when he taught me from books and from scratch, even when I stole his cameras on school trips (only twice- both in senior year), even against his and his parents' lifetime of experience, the generations of us and photographs are taunted by the fucking sun.

Decades. Literally decades. Decades and all the years of accumulated opportunities and equipment, not a single one of us had sunset pictures to be proud of. We have a slew of ones that are close, but a good sunset shot just slips away in the hundreth of a second, through that tiny little hole in the lens. Settings after settings, dusk after dusk, we just don't compete with her anymore. There'll always be something unattainable in your passion, and for us, it's sunset pictures (at least on my dad's side).

But when I have kids, if I dare have kids, I won't tell them this until they're adults; or until they're fucking got it. They won't know how elusive the sun is, they'll just one day scroll through their dslr roll and show me magnificent rainbow pictures of the star herself, and me and grandpa will just casually share that look n smile with a twitch in our eye.

Sunsets are difficult to capture because their beauty

surpasses the perceivable spectrum of a camera.

Their beauty is far too organic and original to be

captured by a machine-made copy pasted onto a conveyor belt.

A dynamic color precession begins with yellow and ends with dusk

while the black box starts black and ends black.

Sunsets play with color and allow the clouds

to paintbrush rays of light into free-flowing necklaces of pure energy.

The rectangle cage baits colors it wants with White Light, and in a flash, colors are

trapped, locked into position,

into frame

into image

into submission

Frozen in the cold, hard, metal, dark, black box.

According to color theory, orange and blue are complementary colors. By definition, the combination of orange and blue blend into a dark, muddy brown.

Only a sunset could blend fiery orange and

sky blue into a beautiful scene

worth a shot.

And that's what I'll tell them, eventually. After all, I'm a writer too.