This beautiful sunset caught my eye out the window. The skies here are just getting better and better. I ran out with my wide-angle lens (the kit lens) and started snapping different angles of it. It didn’t look like this to start, but I stuck around for ten minutes and the clouds came together in this odd formation. It looks like cotton candy, caramel flavored. I found it really interesting that the sun was like a spotlight, because it was dark outside of the clouds as you can see at the edges of this photo.
I don’t have many angles to work with because of the trees in my neighbor’s yard, but this definitely works best for showing the origin of the light (at the bottom). I did most of my post-processing right in Adobe Camera Raw. To improve the look, all I did was increase the contrast and black levels, and then I added a bit more contrast with the curves tool.
Canon Rebel XTi, EFS 18-55mm, 1/100, F4, 18mm, ISO200, 2008-08-19T20:04:27-04, 20080820-000427rxt
Download the high-res JPEG or download the source image (Canon Rebel XTi RAW file).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Credit me as Richard X. Thripp and link here.
This is my first post as a 17 year old. The pivotal birthday was 2008 August 17, a Sunday. My youth is just slipping away. 
I’ve written this list of seventeen things I’ve learned over the years.
1. Passion is fleeting.
I used to be fascinated with the color blue. Then when I was 6 I switched to red. Around 14 I switched back to blue again. Now I’m starting to like green (notice my website’s colors?).
Don’t count on being dedicated to writing, piano, blogging, or photography all your life. Don’t root yourself in material mediums, because it doesn’t matter what you do. What matters is how you do it, or more clearly, what purpose it is for. My purpose is to courageously inspire and facilitate the worthy endeavors of others. I’m going to have to polish that up into a mission statement someday, but it’s a good place to start. I can look at anything I do and ask “is this doing that?” If it’s not, I drop it.
2. Be humble, not because it’s safe, but because it’s courageous.
It takes courage to admit ignorance, and you will never know everything, so you should always have humility. Even if you could know everything, you should stay humble because arrogance is bad form. Let your brilliance be self-evident in your projects and by the voices of others. Oh yes, I completely contradicted this when I named my blog “Brilliant Photography.” But I remain humble in my writings (smack me upside the head if I don’t).
Don’t be humble out of fear. You know someone is humble out of fear because he abandons his humility as soon as he becomes rich or famous or college-educated. A man who is humble for safety transforms into an evil monster once he believes he is in …
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