I was out on a mountain bike ride last night, sweating my way up every nasty hill I could find near our house. One hill was so steep that the bike had no forward momentum at all; I was riding up off the seat, standing on the pedals, and each downward rotation left me kind of perched on the pedals, motionless for a second, until I cranked the pedals again, inched forward, then stopped again. It was like trying to run in place in a huge tub of Jell-O while wearing cement shoes.
All this was in the name of fun, mind you. Exercise. Fitness.
Yes, I’m slightly demented that way.
Out of the corner of my eye I kept watching the sun as it sank lower and lower toward the western horizon. There have apparently been forest fires burning the past few days north of here, up in British Columbia, and the fires have put enough smoke into the atmosphere so that we’ve been witnessing VERY red sunsets. As I rode my bike, the light kept getting more and more otherworldly. Finally when I saw that the sun was about to sink behind some tall fir trees, I put my bike workout on hold and pulled out my camera.
I remember one other time when I made a photograph where the sky looked red, but that was the result of the eccentricities of film. I was shooting a several-hour-long night exposure of the star-filled sky over dramatic Prusik Peak high in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. The long exposure caused a color shift in the film, turning the sky red. It happened also that an airplane flew across the sky during the exposure, the blinking wing lights adding yet another funky element to the image.
