It’s been very difficult to find a sunset lately; it’s been cloudy, I’ve been busy, and they are arriving later and later! The sunset is around 8:30pm these days, which is nice; but it’s far less convenient to have to wait four hours after I get off work! In some ways, those early sunsets are very handy. I can stake out a location, get the photos, and be home in time for dinner. Not any more.

This lone tree sits atop a hill northwest of Bismarck. As I grabbed this angle on the sunset, I realized that I had zoomed in on this particular little lonely tree from the other side of the river earlier this afternoon. In that case, however, there was nothing but a gloomy sky behind it. This angle turned out far better.

I noticed up at one of my favorite sunset spots, a vantage point that is endangered and probably won’t be available for much longer, someone had set up some old patio furniture. Truly remarkable spots are hard to keep secret!

I had the opportunity to chase a sunset last night, so I’m substituting my typical Thursday sunset stakeout with this shot from a previously undiscovered vantage point north of Bismarck. I didn’t know this particular point of view existed, but now that I’ve found it you’ll likely see this angle again.

There haven’t been many good photo opportunities lately, as you may have noticed. The skies have been gray, the temperatures inhospitable, and I’ve been really darn busy. I’m really excited for things to green up and for the wildlife to start flourishing again. I have a feeling that this is going to be a great season for running around with a camera!

It’s been a while since I did a Thursday Sunset post because the sky’s been too hazy to actually witness the sunset! This one is from a short while ago when I’d staked out the Square Buttes north of Mandan. A little trickery brings the blue of the sky together with the orange and gold of the sunset.

On my way north to see what the sun was going to do as it crept over the buttes, I stopped at Double Ditch for a few minutes. This is the corner of the fence on the north end of the park, right along the cliff overlooking the Missouri. The river looked so nicely frozen over and covered with snow from this perspective. The photo may not convey the depth here, because it’s got to be at least a hundred feet down to the river. I was right on the edge, so it’s fortunate I didn’t take a tumble!

It’s been a while since I contributed to my Thursday Night Sunset series, so here we go! Tired of shooting across the city or from U-Mary hill, I ventured west of Mandan a ways for this shot. There are fewer power lines and things out there, and I had just enough time to find some scenic high ground before the sun began to bathe the sky in color. After that I bolted home and went to Applebee’s with my wife to enjoy my favorite Bourbon Street Steak and some boneless wings…yum!

As I dragged my poor, dejected bones away from work today I noticed an interesting phenomenon. The sunset was taking place as it normally does, but it was only visible through a narrow band of clear skies on the horizon. Dense clouds acted as an opaque curtain above, with the horizon not far below. It was quite cool.

That narrow slit in the sky, however, was going to do some pretty cool things as the sun’s rays came through it at various angles. Once the sun began to duck below the horizon, its light began to bathe the clouds with color.

These photos were taken from the hill behind the University of Mary. I got more angles than these, but I think the three photos shown here best convey the story behind tonight’s dramatic skies. What turned out as just a unique window on the sunset became a diffraction grating of sorts (for you science geeks out there) and it was like experiencing three sunsets in one!

With the holiday comes the ability to move around a bit, and of course the trusty camera equipment came with as my wife and I did some geocaching. I was about to take her for a scenic loop around Burnt Creek Loop when I spotted this photo through the tree row. Hunting for photos like this is as fun as hunting for geocaches, and there are no instructions to follow!

For a while there I was doing the Thursday Night Sunset and got a lot of pleasant comments about it when talking to folks. Nowadays there have been so many cool sunsets, I’ve had a hard time confining them to just one day. Then came a really busy stretch with six major videos to be done on a timetable, so I haven’t had much time for photography. I’ve got a bit of a breather here for a few days before my next big deadline, so…here you go!

I was recently reminded that Double Ditch isn’t really the greatest place to watch sunsets, due to the height of the trees across the river. This is at the little picnic table they put up at the end of the road, not up at the stone hut. Perhaps the vantage point is better up on the hill. While I was up there with friends recently, I looked over my shoulder to find this scene instead. The moon looked enormous as it crept over the horizon, the sky was colored from the sunset, and the two came together for a really cool picture.

One other factor that’s caused me to abandon Double Ditch as a place for stargazing is the recent surge in houses being constructed on the Mandan side. There’s just too much stray light. With the incredible pace of expansion northward on both sides of the river, I may find myself heading east or west when I want a clear patch of sky.

No, this isn’t the “All Sunsets, All the Time” blog. In fact, if I’d known that the sky was going to be so spectacular tonight, I wouldn’t have hiked myself silly for the sunset yesterday (see below)!

I left work late again tonight. Yeah, I know…it’s a disorder. But as I left, I noticed that the gray sky was remarkably colorful to the west. In fact, I pulled over and took a couple of pictures from east of the “big hill” before coming into town. I was surprised that the color stayed in the sky so long…long enough, in fact, for me to go up to the top of Hillside Park. That’s where I got these photos.

I took a bunch, but these are my favorite two. This is from the more vivid part of the sunset, before the light began to wane. As always, I’d like to stress that this is straight out of the camera. It was resized, but not retouched. I didn’t brighten it, darken it, or add more color to it. This is God’s work…ain’t it something?

I think the spectacular sunsets of November come from the shallow angle of the sun in relation to the horizon. I don’t know all the technical jargon, but that’s my primitive understanding. Much of the color comes from the light bouncing off the distant horizon, hitting the clouds over us. Once it begins to pass completely past that distant horizon, the colors start to shrink away from us:

Here you can see some of the purple easing into the clouds as the reds retreat. I stood, shivering, atop the water tower and watched as the colors bled from the clouds (I know it’s underground…I still call it a water tower). The harsh red light narrowed at the edge of the visible world, and it wasn’t long before the sun was gone…no doubt giving a remarkable red sunset view to someone in the Mountain Time Zone. That’s okay…I got mine.

So, after spending all day hiking around a coal mine and filming from a 10 million pound crane (cool!), I decided that the cure for standing out in the cold and hiking all over was…yes, that’s right: standing out in the cold and hiking all over! Bismarck, however, was ever so slightly warmer than the mine where I’d worked all day. The wind had toned down a little, too.

I had this grand idea about how the sun, since it now travels so low in the sky, would be perfectly framed if I stood at one end of the historic railroad bridge and it appeared at the other end. A combination of fatigue, sky conditions, and a reluctance to be a tresspasser changed my mind. But I did find a couple of really nice sunset photos from the bike path up on the hill.

One of the characteristics of a North Dakota autumn is the variation in the sun. Not only does it cause temperature swings during this time of year, but it also puts on many faces. Gone are the evenly lit afternoons of the summer, replaced with long, stark shadows even on the clearest of days. Today we were shown a nice range of color, too!

I had sauntered down to Fox Island to get some river shots, which I may post down the road…but then the sky caught my eye and I snapped this one. It was nice to have clear skies, having had nothing but clouds for the Orionid meteor shower this weekend. But the sky wasn’t done with color just yet…

I had grabbed a bag of tacos and headed to my secret sunset spot high atop a hill north of Bismarck, when the sky began to change colors. Before long, those blues had turned to vivid reds. I got a few like this while shoveling tacos into my head. This is actually the MANDAN hill on the east side of town, as zoomed in from quite a ways away. In fact, KNDR’s tower is dead-center in the photo, but is only clearly visible in the full size version.

The temps may be a little low for my liking, but I’ll take those dramatic autumn skies. Soon they’ll be replaced with the dreary gray of winter, and it’ll be interesting to see what we shutterbugs do then!