I Don’t Shoot Sunsets (Except in Aqaba Jordan)

I don’t shoot sunsets.  While beautiful to watch, I find them completely uninteresting as photographs.  To make things worse, it is inevitable that your friends reliably reserve three obligatory categories of snapshots they feel duty bound to show you - their children, their dog, and the sunset from their last vacation.  And to make things worse, these sunset shots generally lack any sense of composition, no sense of scale (something else of interest in the photograph), and amount to little more than a gradient of pretty colors.

Having just completely trashed the lifework of my mother who has dedicated her complete artistic self to capturing sunsets from every vacation she has ever taken, I will now take a contrary position.  Given my disdain for the cliché of a sunset photograph, the obvious challenge is “how does one make a sunset interesting as a photograph?”

This week I was forced into trying to make a sunset interesting.  I am now in Aqaba Jordan.  From what I have seen, Aqaba is a beautiful place filled with extremely nice and helpful people.  However, I have been working sufficiently long hours that my opportunities for photography have been limited.  I was a able to escape momentarily with camera and tripod for a few shots; mostly around the Intercontinental Hotel where I am staying, and therefore these sunset photographs.
I hope you find them a bit more interesting than the dreaded vacation sunset photograph.  For all of the habitual sunset shooters out there, please accept my apologies.
Standby for more from Aqaba.
Have fun and go make some great photography.
Craig