Had a great first full day at work today. I b-s'ed along with everybody, and made a point not to keep my mouth shut. It worked, and everybody there seems to be ok with me. Andy is happy.

I get off at 4, and Daddy Reiki gets off at 4:30, so afterward I drive over to Kettering's Lincoln Park to see if there's any good photo ops for my Camera Skills class assignment. Sho'nuff there's this weirdo metal sculpture that looks great in the late afternoon light. I complete part 1 of the assignment having bracketed a shot which includes the whole sculpture. I think it would've been more artistically pleasing had I moved closer to abstract the curves and brushed texture of the galvanized steel, but the assingment called for a shot with both shadows and highlights... so wide-angle I went.

I cruise back to Books & Co. and get there right at 4:30, but he's already left. The sky is looking very promising for one helluva sunset, and I was going to see if he wanted to come up to the Patterson Memorial with me while I shot it with the Nikon and new tripod. Oh well. His loss.

I cruise up to the Patterson Memorial, the site of my last round of sunset photos, and as the sun is still about twenty minutes away from the horizon, my trigger finger gets itchy and I decide to take a few photos of the memorial bathed in that golden late afternoon sunlight, as I did last summer in the full midday sun. There, I decide to shoot part 2 of my assignment, just some trees, but lit from the side, they had both bright and dark spots. Not anything especially interesting compositionally, but it got the job done.

The sun nears the horizon, so I set my tripod up and sit on the concrete fence that keeps cars from plunging down the almost-sheer hillside to the golf course quite a way down below, and I wait....