The sun sets along Maui’s west coast as a dinner cruise ship approaches.

Back Story

Admittedly, it doesn’t take much to grab a great sunset like this on Maui, with only a little bit of help from the clouds and mother nature. It’s really more about spending the time to scout a good location and something to frame the shot with, and deciding whether you want to go warm or cool with the sky.

Still, I have a big thing for palm tree silhouettes (more on that in a second) and in the process of shooting that night, I found myself shooting next to an older gentleman from Arizona trying to capture his little digital memory of the golden moment. We started up a conversation, shared a few of our camera settings while the light was still just right, and then spent maybe another 20 minutes afterwards just talking story (as they say in Hawaii).

Although the Maui Photo Festival hadn’t officially started yet, and this person wasn’t an attendee, it was great to already be sharing stories and taking about camera gear and creative tastes with another photographer. Something I probably wouldn’t have done a few years back before first attending the workshops in ’09. That’s a pretty neat change, for me.

Those #MauiSunset Photos

The other reason I wanted to get a few good sunsets this trip was to help support the #MauiSunset Catalogue project that I began earlier in the year. The concept, unbeknownst to me at the time, started two years ago when I begin using the #MauiSunset hashtag on Twitter. I even wrote a post over at my Maui by Photo site trying to help spread it’s use at the time.

Fast forward to about this time last year when I formally re-branded my Maui photo day calendar to the Daily Maui Photo website that exists today, and the creative juices started flowing.

Not long after that, when trying to come up with ideas on how to expand to more than just one Maui photo a day, it occurred to me to have a Maui sunset photo every night. Well, short of relocating to Maui (a whole separate topic altogether) I had to rely on others to help source those special, magical moments every night. At that point, I decided to head over to Flickr and create the #MauiSunset group and start inviting photos that I found on the service.

From there, I put together a simple catalogue page that lets people browse different sunset photos by the night they were taken. There’s over 250+ photos so far, and even though it’s not as real-time as one could wish for, it’s been a neat little experiment to put together.

Now I just need to get sometime together to help promote it and get the word out. So if you happen to be still reading this, would you care to help? 🙂