Ruby Beach, Washington State - An Epic Sunset

Laurence · Expire: 2016-06-19

I had heard later that this sunset in April of last year (2014) was an astonishing epic red sky all up and down the Washington coastline, lasting about 20 minutes. I was on Highway 101 near Forks, when the colors started to form, so I pulled into the Ruby Beach overlook parking lot. Wanted to see if I could get Ruby Creek in the foreground, so I scurried down the trail to the beach where Ruby Creek enters the ocean. The position enabled me to get the reflection of color onto Ruby Creek, and also a bit of the shoreline of the creek for balance.

The colors are NOT manipulated. The only thing I did to the image was to crop parts of the original. There was a couple from South Carolina visiting the area for the first time, and they just about went nuts looking at this scene. Surprised

There was a moderate wind blowing offshore, so the trees on the island/seastack blurred up a little.

I took a few images with a Fuji X-100 digital camera as well, but they just didn't look as good as the scanned Velvia slide.

Ruby Beach Sunset
Contax AX
Zeiss Planar T* 50/1.4
Exposure unrecorded (lots of bracketing but I think mostly metered for the sky and let the seastacks fall into silhouetted black)
Velvia (of course)