2009_02_25_Don Quixote for a day

2009_02_25_Don Quixote for a day

I felt like the obsessive fictional hero as I somewhat frantically drove around the four square miles or so of roads that surrounded the thirty-three newly constructed windmills outside the small Kansas town of Marienthal. However, instead of battling the windmills in a more chivalrous endeavor, I was dealing with something much more fleeting and obscure, the light.

After driving over four hours straight west into the vast, barren, brown land known as western Kansas and only being a few handfuls of miles from the Colorado border I was banking deeply on the fact that the sky would open up and give me one of her more fantastic sunsets to work with. After all, the sole reason I came all this way was to make a pictorial type photo, beautiful in its nature, of the windmills for the upcoming cover for one of the four sections of The Hutchinson News' yearly progress section.

When the light started to fade I knew it would either be a great sunset or there wouldn't be one at all. Clouds had started to roll in which is actually a great thing since clouds make the sky more dynamic and actually enhance the colors of the sunset. But, with those benefits also comes a huge downside, clouds can completely kill a sunset by blocking out the light. At the beginning it was great, the sun was parting the clouds and creating beautiful shades of color on the clouds and reflecting off the large reflective bases of the windmills.



I became worried though just as the sun was starting to get into it's peak position it was matted out by the clouds. I waited and waited but nothing changed the sun just stuck to the back of a huge set of clouds concealing all the light except for a few shades of not so fantastic grey. Just as I was about to call it a day she broke through right at the horizon line and lit up the entire cloud mass that used to be blocking here.

It worked out for some wonderful pictures and a great trip.

Thanks for looking.
-Brad Vest








After about 20 minutes of nothing but grey, the sun appeared again and gave a wonderful show of color for about ten minutes before continuing on to other parts of the western hemisphere.


This is the photo we chose to run for the cover of the wind progress section. It was so great to see the way we used the photos for the covers of each section. We went big! Each section front was just a photo, no text, no graphics, just a giant photo welcoming readers into the section.

Thanks for looking,
Brad Vest

Listening to: Stork and Owl, Tv on the Radio