Sunset Over Koh Lan from Supalai Mare Pattaya

We had a west-facing sea view apartment on the 30th floor of Supalai Mare Pattaya at Jomtien Beach, which I think is the only reason a shot like this was even possible. The window framed the whole horizon and the sun did the rest. April 2 — early in the year, before the haze gets bad — and the entire sky went pink and red about twenty minutes before the actual set.

The 50-230 was already on the body. I put it at 230 to compress everything: the sun, the cloud bar slicing across its middle, the neighbouring tower standing in for the foreground, and Koh Lan stretching across the far water like a sleeping animal. Telephoto lenses make distant things look closer to each other than they are — that is what this whole frame is built on.

Settings were stubborn. f/6.7 because the lens will not open wider at 230, 1/100 because I was leaning on the windowsill and that was the slowest I trusted myself at the long end, ISO 160 to keep the sky clean. The clouds did most of the work. That bar of cloud cutting across the sun is what makes the shot — without it you have just got a pink sky.

Pattaya gets a lot of names thrown at it and most of them do not include "sunsets like this." But every evening there are fifteen minutes where the city quiets down and you remember it is just a town on the Gulf of Thailand.