More remarkable even than the beauty of the setting sun over Warsaw may be the fact that in the ten years I’ve been admiring this view it never occurred to me to photograph it until this year. Now, if the view had changed, or my camera were new, that might explain things, but my camera is a beat-up entry-level digital SLR manufactured by Canon in 2005, and it’s nearly as old as the view. A decade older still is the lens I use to capture these light shows in the sky: the fixed-focal-length 2.8 aperture 200mm L-series workhorse. What a lens it is—solid and gentle, close and bright, enduring. Considering how dated and unremarkable the camera body is by today’s standards, it’s clear that all of the magic in these images must reside in the lens.

Except, maybe, whatever magic it was that finally graced the photographer with her present inspiration.