On Montara Mountain (2018)

Serious photographers don’t shoot sunsets and so I decided I would shoot sunsets.

Sunset photos, invariably, are all about the sun crashing into the horizon, the sky all ablaze. But most sunsets aren’t like that and furthermore, sunsets are about more than that moment when the sun reaches the horizon.

It’s sort of like surfing photography. You’ll see some surfer riding some wave, or just about to fall off the board. But the surfers I see, and I see them most every day, mostly sit on their boards in some sort of Zen-trance, waiting. The experience of surfing is, as far as I can tell (I don’t surf), very different than what you might think if you’d just seen images of surfing.

And so I set out to make honest photographs of sunsets, dragging my heavy tripod and camera up the mountain trail to the bluff overlooking the ocean, day after day, to shoot (on video) the minutes just before sunset and the minutes just after, which turn out to be far more rewarding than surf-porn sunset images.

Below is a compilation of short excerpts from the nearly one hundred and fifty videos I made for this project.