While driving this afternoon West of Austin, I could see lots of high clouds and I figured that this would make for a nice sunset. So, I went back home, got my camera gear, and headed for a perch that overlooks Lake Travis. I got there about 20 minutes before sunset, set up my tripod, and began to wait.

The sun set below the horizon, the other people said ‘wow’ and left. But they hadn’t seen anything but the sun go away. The clouds were still dull gray and nothing had happened yet. Many people think that the point of sunset is watching the sun go past the horizon and that is it I guess.

About 5 or 10 minutes later, the high clouds began to light up and I went to work. All of the following photos are HDR merges to capture the full dynamic range of the light. The orange clouds were forming stripes across the sky.

As the colors intensified, I noticed that the lake was really picking up the colors of the sky.

So, I switched lenses to try to get a closer shot of the lake. The below merge was taken at 35mm.

There were also some very interesting clouds on the horizon that I tried to photograph.

After this, I packed up and went home. Hope you enjoyed the photos. Please leave a comment below.