David McElroy

A woman I know sent me a few pictures of her young daughter Friday. I hadn’t seen pictures of this little girl for about six or eight months — and I wasn’t prepared for how seeing her would affect me.

This little lady is beautiful. Her mother is beautiful, too, so that’s no surprise, but she’s already getting to the point that she looks more like a beautiful little girl than just a drooling baby. She has some teeth and you can see depth of personality in her toothy little grin. You can see some kind of beauty that transcends physical appearance in an inexplicable way.

Looking at those pictures almost made me cry, because I was overwhelmed with a beauty that pierced my heart and pointed me once again toward the joy of living in this amazing Creation.

Saturday evening at sunset, I was walking in a local park when I realized the sky had suddenly started turning pink and orange and red and gold. I stopped walking and just stood there trying to drink it all in. For about 15 minutes, I felt as though I was watching a Master Painter put on another showing of the world’s longest-running art show. The western sky glowed and changed colors constantly for a few minutes, but even the sky overhead and on other sides was a delicate pink and orange.

A little girl came walking by with her parents and she looked at me as she pointed to the sky.

“It’s pink!” she told me with excitement in her voice.

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I used to take a lot of sunset pictures, but I haven’t felt much like it this year. I wanted to test something about my camera, though, so I went to a hill near where I live Thursday evening to wait for sunset.

My iPhone’s weather app told me that sunset would be at 7:41 p.m. I was in place three minutes early, with my iPhone and my Canon T3i. There were clouds, but the light didn’t look promising. Except for a few spotty pink streaks, the sky was gray.

I know from experience that the color can suddenly appear up to about 10 minutes after sunset, so I waited. But nothing happened. The sky continued to look gray with a few very minor streaks of color from time to time. When the clock got to 7:55 and there was still nothing worth photographing, I was disappointed.

I decided to quit waiting. I got into the car and started driving down the hill where I’d been waiting.

When I had driven almost completely down the hill, I suddenly looked up and saw an amazing pastel image of flaming shades of orange and pink mixed with gray and black. It was perfect, but I was now out of position.

I quickly turned the car around and got to a decent vantage point. It wasn’t quite as good a spot as where I’d been to start with, but it would still work. I jumped out of the car and had time to shoot about four frames — right before the vibrant rays of colorful light faded away just as quickly as they had appeared.

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