Okay, let me walk you through this whole ‘mr orange suns’ thing I was messing around with. It wasn’t like some grand project I planned out for weeks, not at all. It just sort of happened.
It started pretty simple. I was just noticing, you know, on some mornings or evenings, how the sun wasn’t just yellow or golden, but really, truly orange. Like, deep, hazy orange. Especially when the air felt a bit thick, maybe dusty or humid. It looked kinda unreal, like a big orange marble just sitting low in the sky. It really stuck with me.
Trying to Catch It
So, I thought, hey, maybe I should try and take some pictures of this. Nothing fancy, mind you. I wasn’t about to buy a new camera or anything. I just grabbed my phone, the one I use every day. The first few times I tried, honestly, the pictures looked like garbage. The phone camera would either make everything super bright and washed out, or the orange just turned into a boring yellow. Didn’t capture what I was actually seeing.
I started messing around a bit more seriously then.
Here’s what I did:
- I forced myself to get up really early some mornings. Like, before the birds. That was tough, not gonna lie.
- I drove around a bit, trying to find spots where I had a clear view. Found this little hill just outside town that worked okay. Evenings were easier, sometimes just from my back porch if the conditions were right.
- I fiddled with the phone camera settings. Learned how to lock the focus and exposure by tapping and holding on the screen. That helped sometimes to stop it from freaking out and changing the brightness constantly.
- Sometimes I’d wait for a bit of cloud or haze, seemed to make the orange colour pop more, filter the light, I guess.
The Actual Doing Bit
It turned into this little ritual for a while. Check the sky, see if it had that orangey potential. If yes, grab the phone and head out, or just step outside. Sometimes it was a total dud – just a regular sunrise or sunset. But other times, boom, there it was. That crazy deep orange.
I remember one specific evening, the sky was super hazy after a hot day. The sun was going down behind these trees, and it was just this perfect, glowing orange orb. Looked amazing. I was trying hard to get the phone to capture that specific shade. Took maybe ten or fifteen pictures, moving around slightly, trying different zooms.
Getting the colour right was the biggest headache. Phones just want to ‘correct’ things sometimes, make it look ‘normal’, but I wanted that weird, intense orange. It was frustrating when the picture just didn’t match the real thing.
So, What Came Out of It?
In the end, I didn’t produce any award-winning photos or anything like that. What I got was a folder on my phone filled with pictures of these orange suns. Some are better than others. A few actually look pretty close to what I saw, that deep, almost reddish-orange.
But really, it was more about the process. You know? Taking the time to actually look at something simple like the sun, noticing the difference in colours. And then the challenge of trying to capture it with the basic tool I had. It was kinda satisfying, just watching and clicking, even if the results weren’t perfect. Just a simple thing I did, chasing those mr orange suns.
