I nearly missed this shot. The sun was nearly completely down and, due to the dense clouds, the area around the temple was quite dark. I packed up my gear, threw it in the car, and was heading out. As I drove up the road I looked back and saw this scene. I quickly parked the car, setup, and snapped some shots.

Due to my close proximity to the temple and the wide angle focal length used, I had to adjust the image for perspective in Photoshop, thus a bit got cropped.

I often get asked whether the colors seen in the photo are real. Of course, color is a somewhat subjective thing as each person’s eye perceives color a bit differently, but the colors are true to what I saw. The bright orange along the horizon was caused by the sunlight reflecting off the clouds of dirt being blown in from the west desert.