The West coast of Barbados is lined with hotels and posh restaurants sitting along the relatively calm blue and turquoise sea, all in the front row for some of Barbados’ most magnificent sunsets. It should be obvious that we’d love to capture one (or more) of these burning skies while on the island for our two weeks of shooting for various hotels and destination spots. They are sought after not only by clients, but every paradise pining guest searching the web. So we wait. Every evening. Camera in hand and watching the skies with hope. And every night we’re met with clouds at the horizon and vaguely pastel hints rather than the colorful array everyone keeps showing us on their Instagram account. The reason, we’re told, is that we’re in the unfortunate wake of Sahara Dust. Now, the everyday person would never call the weather bad on any scale and may not even notice much of a difference. It’s beautiful here! But the first week was a challenge for capturing staple daytime Barbados photographs because we knew the light haze in the sky wasn’t normal, the clouds were a little too dense, and the colors didn’t truly reflect how beautiful the island can be. We were told every day that up until we arrived, the weather was flawless (naturally). But in the evenings, we continued to run into what we saw as a cloud “problem” with very lacklustre sunsets, that is until we changed the perspective.
Not willing to let a continued lack of vibrant sunsets discourage us, we started to experiment a bit with the light. So, one evening, patiently waiting at Beach View’s rooftop Sunset Bar for the sun to lower in the distance, knowing it was going to be another pastel kind of night, we left the shutter open for a while, just to see what happened – maybe we could save the sunset. With each new exposure, it became more and more dramatic and we finally had something to get excited about. Clouds drifted, creating motion in the sky, and the deck became vibrant and inviting. Check out the final product.
To read more about the Sahara Dust covering the Caribbean take a look at this article from the Jamaica Observer: Sahara Dust Covers The Caribbean
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