Celebrating the Sunsets of Seattle
THE SPACE NEEDLE is a familiar, cliche, and highly photographable landmark. But from my neighborhood it is also a marker pointing east, towards the Olympic Mountains, the Pacific, and towards the sunset.
I have been stepping out of my apartment to snap photos of the sunset when the inspiration strikes for the last 3 months or so. I do it as an afterthought, an excuse to get outside before the world goes dark.
When my wife and I decided to move to Los Angeles and began preparing to uproot ourselves, I tripped on the thought that I would not have any more Seattle sunsets, or Seattle anything for that matter. I will have new sunsets, L.A. sunsets, and I will have to learn to love them.
Maybe it is true what they say, that you don’t really know what you have until it is gone. I have lost a precious thing or two in my 30 years and I don’t want ignorance of what I have and what I lost to slap me in the face once more. I want to appreciate what I have while I still have it, while I can still pull it into focus and frame it up just so.
This is my love letter to Seattle and her sunsets. When I stand on Capitol Hill, where 99% of these photos were taken, I look over downtown to Elliot Bay and the setting sun but I also look across the water to where I was born and raised. The rise of trees that stands in parallax with the jagged mountains is where I spent the first 20 years of my life.
Where I will spend the next 20 is a question that never strays far from my mind as I pull reams of packing tape across overstuffed boxes marked ‘fragile’.