The Crystal Pool building on a cool fall day at Glen Echo Park, Maryland

The sun sets over the horizon as a children's; art building sits empty in Glen Echo Park, Maryland.

Although it doesn’t serve any practical purpose at Glen Echo Park since it can more accurately be described as a wall, the Crystal Pool building is a prominent feature in the park that is often a willing subject for artists painting en plein air; and if I had to guess, it’s probably frequently photographed as well.

My take on the Crystal Pool building was to photograph it using an extreme wide angle lens so that I could capture its height and as much of cloudy sky. On the left-side of the frame, you can see the back of a children’s art building sitting at the top of a small hill.

A warm summer sun sets over the Mississippi River.

The sun sets behind a bridge over the Mississippi River

A meerkat looks into the setting sun while its family burrows in the dirt.

An elephant stands in the warm afternoon sun at the Memphis Zoo.

My first SLR was a Pentax K1000 that I purchased from a used camera store in Memphis, Tennessee. I eventually replaced that Pentax, but sometimes I wish I had it just to see the exposure needle move up and down in the viewfinder again.

The two sunset photos were taken from Tom Lee Park on the banks of the Mississippi River back when I was still a beginner at photography in the mid-1990s. If I had to guess, sunset photographs are really popular first photographs for beginners, and I was no different. I haven’t taken sunset photographs since then, but these photographs remain in my collection because they were my first “keepers”.