…An East Coast Sunset.

Not possible, right? The sun sets in the west, so how can you see it from the east coast? Well, this is Thailand. Strange things can happen, and often do.

Just kidding. Of course you can see the sun set in the west, but seeing it over the sea is difficult.

But there I was trolling around on Google Maps – as I do (it’s how I find many of the unusual places I visit) – and I noticed that not too far from here there’s a strip of land that sticks out into the sea, allowing water views both east and west. Yesterday afternoon I thought “I have to visit” – so I did.

Laem (Cape) Thuat is actually a ferry terminal for boats to Koh Samui, Koh Phangan and lesser islands. A long cape pointing north, with a long pier going even norther, is an ideal place for docking ferry boats, especially when they need to go north or northeast.

I arrived late afternoon, with more of that bright sunlight I mentioned in my last article. This is how everything looked at about 5pm…

Above is Wat Khao Suan Pradit which is very close to Don Sak town. That’s looking southwest from the ferry terminal. Below, and looking east, is the small island of Ko Reat I visited a couple of months ago…

So, while waiting for the sunset, I took some more sea views…

And then some of the pier and boats…

Which was when I spotted these characters…

“Okay, no need to worry the passengers. Just slap some putty in there and I’ll cover it with this duct tape. Should be good for another trip or two. Maybe.”

And then the light began to fade, and the sun started to sink…

…which is when it hit me. Not the sun, but the fact there was land behind the glare, and the sun wasn’t going to drop into the sea at all. Pretty obvious really. I was on the east coast looking west. Duh! But the mountains are at least 100kms away, so for all intents and purposes it looked like the sun was falling into the sea. See…

…until it became very low…

…and then the mountains popped into view. Now, I’ll spare you having to scroll down through far too many sunset pics, but if you want to see them all then you can wade through the gallery…

…which all look a bit like this, but bigger …

And that meant it was time to jump into Bert, drive past Wat Khao Suan Pradit …

… and arrive home after – but not too far after – Beer O’Clock.

Now it’s confession time. All of the images I put into Twitterings pages have been photoshopped.

Arrggh. Disgraceful.

No, no, not true. Wait up. Let me explain…

An original image I take from my camera is 4272×2848 pixels. If I put those straight into the blog, not only would they take forever to download, but they’d be at least ten times larger than your screen. So you’d be scrolling up and down, left and right, just to look at one image. Not fun. So I reduce them to 730x478px, which just fit nicely, at least on most screens. So photoshopping, is not really a BadThing.

But that’s not all. You see, a digital camera captures light, turns it into data, and stores it. The camera also decides how it thinks I should see the image. And the brain does something similar. It takes data from the optic nerves, and it figures the best way for me (or you) to see the image. Now, my camera and my brain don’t talk to each other (one day they will, you can be sure of that!) so what my camera decides I should see, often isn’t the same thing my brain saw. Which, cutting a long boring story short, is why I feel justified in photoshopping the images.

I adjust color densities, balance, brightness, contrast, and other things, until I think the image on screen is very close to what I actually saw. It’s not like I’m changing the captured data to show you trees with pink spotted leaves, or beaches with blue sand. I could, but I don’t.

And I mention this now because the sunset images scream “Photoshop.” But no, they are completely untouched by Photoshop, except for having their size changed. I thought you should know that 🙂