This past Sunday was truly epic, all starting at 2:45 in the morning, when it was time to get up, pack the URBEX gear into the car, and head out to meet up with four other like-minded explorers to hit five URBEX targets in Germany.  We were headed out of Berlin to our first target by 3:45 in the morning, and arrived at our first location, as planned, just before the sun started to rise.  All told, we covered 572 kilometers (356 miles) before we arrived back in Berlin around 10:30 pm, and had the opportunity to experience and photograph an amazing sunrise, a spectacular sunset, and everything in between.  Over time, I will share tales from that explore, information about the locations and, of course, some good photography!  Let’s kick it off with the sunset that ended our adventure, beneath which I’ll share some comments about how we almost did not shoot it!

Like many photographers, I prefer shooting at the edges of the day; that is, around sunrise and sunset.  Often, it is impossible to be out and about at those perfect shooting periods, unless you do this kind of thing for a living.  So when I have the opportunity to shoot in this kind of light, you can believe I’ll take it.  In this particular case, as we were headed home, we had already left our last shoot site, and had a three hour drive back to Berlin ahead of us.  Sure, we knew the sun would be setting during that return drive, but we also figured we’d be able to find a suitable subject to capture in the foreground of whatever beautiful sunset we were allowed to experience.  So, off we raced, hurtling along the German autobahn (this one without a speed-limit) at warp speed, to find our shot.   Easier said than done!  Every time we thought we found a decent subject, we could find no easy route to access it.  Where we found off roads, there were no subjects.  It was not until about 10 or 15 minutes before expected sunset that we spied these behemoths off in a field, as we hoped against hope that we could access the area (most of these windmill farms are fenced off).  As you can see above, we lucked out, in a big way.  Not only were we able to access the location, but we were even given a dirt road to use as a leading line!  How cool is that!