Moody colors paint the skies of Greg Sager’s Instagram photos, along with bright flashes of long-reaching lightning set against the backdrop of the city. The 32-year-old attorney lives in Quincy and posts mesmerizing shots to his account @gsager18 every single day.
Q. What made you decide to start posting to Instagram?
A. Last summer, after I passed the bar exam, I went on a weeklong trip to Glacier National Park. I was looking around on Instagram to see what other people were posting in that area, and I noticed these great photographers who were there at the same time as me. I was in awe of the kinds of things they were posting, and so I looked into it more and started posting things every day, trying to one-up myself from what I had done yesterday.
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Q. You shoot a lot of sunrises and sunsets. What do you like about shooting them? What is difficult about it?
A. I think I gravitate toward that because that’s when you get the best color in the sky. I try to take pictures that can only be taken from a certain place at a certain time, and you only get a short window for sunrises and sunsets. What can be challenging is that the amount of light is always changing, so you have to keep adjusting the camera settings to make sure nothing’s being overexposed or underexposed.
Q. What are some of your favorite locations to shoot in Boston?
A. I actually have a spreadsheet that I’ve been curating for the last six months, which I initially started to chart locations for photos where I wanted the moon to be in a specific place in the sky. It now has 65 locations on it, based on if they’re good for things like sunsets, sunrises, blue hour, or foliage — the sunset and sunrise locations are ranked from one to five stars. Some places I keep going back to are the BU Bridge, anywhere along Memorial Drive, and a spot in East Boston right along the waterfront.
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Q. What makes for a perfect day for photography, in your book?
A. The best is when you get a thunderstorm that rolls in about an hour before sunset so that the sun can peek out at the last minute, right before it sets. Usually it will light up the undersides of the clouds, and the whole sky will just light up. But those are pretty rare.
Interview was edited and trimmed. Kaitlyn Locke can be reached at kaitlyn.locke@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter at@ke_locke.