Hasta La Gadget!

Sitting outside — or cozily inside looking out — and watching a sunset, drink in hand, is about the best part of vacation.

As such, inevitably this moment makes its way onto you camera roll. Sometimes, though, the result isn’t nearly as good as the moment itself. That is, unless you’re a whiz at taking pictures of sunsets, as the people below are.

A few sunset photography tips for the weary: Make sure the lens isn’t focused on the sun, that way you’ll avoid sun spots, photographer Lora Drasner told Forbes a few years back. Or, as Jim Harmer told Nikon, shoot 15 – 20 minutes after the sun sets to get the best moody pictures.

OR, if you want to avoid all our advice and just look at pretty sunsets, look no further than the beauties below.

@HuffPostTravel #mybestsunset pic.twitter.com/WhPV6fRphu

— Lisa (@lisa_nz_hr) September 18, 2014

.@HuffPostPhoto Cape Town, South Africa, Feb 2014. #mybestsunset pic.twitter.com/CEj4ySBSEU

— Mark Krajnak (@MarkKrajnak) September 19, 2014

@HuffPostTravel San Diego, July 2014. #mybestsunset pic.twitter.com/DRBCqnQBB6

— Mélanie St-Laurent (@MelSLaurent) September 18, 2014

@HuffPostTravel An incredible mid-September evening in Beacon, New York #mybestsunset pic.twitter.com/PgPvQqBoIK

— Curtis M. Wong (@c_wong79) September 18, 2014

@huffposttravel #mybestsunset #spain #andalucia pic.twitter.com/9F26zR0oFW

— annemiekwils (@annemiekwils) September 23, 2014

@HuffPostTravel Like the strum of a guitar, there is a beautiful rhythm to a West Texas sunset. #mybestsunset pic.twitter.com/LuNihSW9nc

— Visit Lubbock (@Visit_Lubbock) September 18, 2014

@HuffPostTravel Charlie Young Beach in Kihei, Maui. Grateful to have witnessed this beauty #mybestsunset pic.twitter.com/rP5UV4V0VL

— Sonia Q. (@Q_Catalana) September 18, 2014

@HuffPostTravel #mybestsunset #miami #biscaynebay pic.twitter.com/RzN8pVRsRa

— revelMarketing (@AnsRoss25) September 18, 2014

.@HuffPostTravel Sunset over Los Padres National Forest #mybestsunset #california pic.twitter.com/hCv43YRWGF

— All Roads North (@allroadsnorth) September 18, 2014

“@HuffPostTravel: We’re looking for the most beautiful sunset #mybestsunset”
Door County Wisconsin pic.twitter.com/Qzht7aSOwU

— Robert James (@jamesgang_wi) September 18, 2014

@HuffPostTravel Big golden sky to you all the way from @bigstonegap_VA #mybestsunset pic.twitter.com/jR1ERgDSqq

— Big Stone Gap, VA (@bigstonegap_VA) September 18, 2014

@HuffPostTravel I was in Nicaragua at Ometepe island and i think this is a good one! #mybestsunset #Nicaragua pic.twitter.com/YhaFtrMUps

— Alessio (@alessiobzz) September 18, 2014

@HuffingtonPost Loch Creran, Scotland #mybestsunset pic.twitter.com/dhtGCDH7Ej

— A (@Geminiak) September 18, 2014

@HuffPostTravel #mybestsunset love your feed! pic.twitter.com/qeTT0kTzMx

— Robert Radford (@robertradford) September 18, 2014

It’s not always beautiful, and sometimes it’s downright disgusting.

But for those quirky travelers who looove airplane food, good news: it may soon be headed to a doorstep near you.

A new service called Air Food One is currently delivering the ground-level equivalent of airline meals to households in Germany.

We’re talking some (loosely translated) “grilled codfish,” “filled ravioli” and “chicken breast with pepper cream sauce” — on your very own kitchen table. What a lucky day!

Air Food One is the result of a partnership between site Allyouneed.com and LSG Sky Chefs, the company that dreams up menus for Lufthansa.

On the Air Food One website, customers choose between vegetarian or classic meals. Then, every Wednesday, they receive a meal at their doorsteps, ready for heating and eating. The service costs between $11 and $13 per plate.

The meals are inspired by business-class meals on planes, Allyouneed spokesperson Max Thinius told HuffPost Travel via email. The difference is that they’re made shortly before arriving at the customers’ homes and are never frozen.

“You find the meals on planes, exactly that way,” Thinius said. “[Air Food One] is just fresher.”

The entrees do look somewhat similar to the business class offerings on Lufthansa.

Currently, the Air Food One service is offered only in Dusseldorf and Cologne, Germany in what Thinius calls a “pre-pre-pilot test.” If the response is favorable, Air Food One will consider expanding.

And as for the rumor that the meals are just leftover airplane food on its way to the trash? Not so.

“We prepare them in a little different way,” Thinius said.

Fall fashion is great because sweatpants.

And this week, a few of our favorite stars stepped out in outfits that we basically want to cozy up in. Miley Cyrus wore an affordable sweatsuit, while Rita Ora’s Adidas sweatshirt got us excited for the season. Now all we want to do is snuggle up in front of a fire and enjoy the perks of the season.

Check out all the best cheap celeb finds of the week and let us know if you agree with our picks.

Think hard: When’s the last time you took credit–really took credit–for a job well done? Without giving props to others, shying away from praise, or otherwise shifting the recognition to anyone but yourself?

A study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that women who work with men are far less likely to take credit for their work than those who collaborate with other women. Instead, women in mixed-gender work teams tend to give more credit than is necessary–or even true–to their male colleagues. This is habitual: Instead of talking about themselves in an honest way, women give away the credit, talking about the great team they had, the collaborative efforts involved, the talents of someone, anyone, else. In some instances, women will even point to the negative aspects of themselves or their achievements instead of simply saying “thank you” or otherwise owning potential praise. Sound familiar?

Why is this? It’s complicated. Women are more natural sharers or group participants, used to a hard-to-shake “we” mentality over an “I” mentality. Also women, when paired with male partners, devalue their contributions because that’s what work culture in many ways still seems to do. The study also suggested the rising incidence of the “Imposter Syndrome”, in which high-achieving people (mostly women) don’t feel they deserve the success that they have earned. And so they divert the credit onto others–namely, the men in the group.

But boastful is what helps workers get ahead. A report from management consulting firm Accenture called “The Next Generation of Working Women” found that women are less likely to speak up than men, less likely to proactively manage their own careers, and less likely to ask for a raise. According to an NPR report, the last fact can mean anywhere from $1 million to $1.5 million in lost earnings over a woman’s lifetime. Owning up to your accomplishments isn’t about arrogance; it’s about equality.

The answer isn’t for women to work exclusively with women–or even to start “acting like a man” at work–but there are clear changes women can make to reprogram the habit of giving credit where credit isn’t due. It’s common sense: Taking accountability for yourself and your work means accepting the good along with the bad. If you own up to your mistakes, why shouldn’t you own up to your victories? Here’s how to start getting over the fear of healthy self-promotion:

Honor thyself. Take the time to acknowledge your accomplishments internally–getting used to the idea on a personal level will make outwardly owning up more comfortable and more natural. Realize that taking credit for the work you’ve done doesn’t undermine the efforts of the team, and that owning your work isn’t bigheaded if it’s simply true. Understand that it’s not about politeness, but that you might actually be hurting yourself and your career (not to mention your bottom line) by giving too much credit to everyone else.

Ask for accountability. When companies make an effort to recognize the work of the individual, versus that of a group, it’s easier for women to take proper credit without much self-promotion. Many organizations don’t aim to understand who does what, and how well, so long as the work gets done. Speak up and that will begin to change. Let your boss know that while you were happy to give the entire department props for your work,you want to be sure he knew that the real credit–at least in his eyes–belonged to you, and that it represented your level of commitment to the job.

Have someone else brag for you. Consider teaming up with a friend or partner at work who can talk up your skills and call out your achievements for you–and you can do the same in return. This is called co-bragging, and it works.

It was a global nail-biter last week, but after Scotland voted to uphold their often rocky 300-year union with England, Mark Morris’ The Muir and A Wooden Tree, which opened his troupe’s season at Cal Performances in Berkeley last night, proved a graceful though decidedly eccentric salute to that proud nation, tinged with melancholy and regret.

Amid the lighthearted skipping and tripping by Morris’ strapping swains and shepherdesses through Beethoven’s delectable 19th century arrangements of Scottish and Irish folk songs in The Muir, we chance upon Walter Scott in a pensive mood (“the quiet lake, the balmy air, the stream, the tower, the tree/ are they still such as once they were, or is the dreary change in me?”) and Robert Burns’ lament of “the lovely lass of Inverness,” who mourns the death of her father and brothers in the bloodbath of Culloden that put paid to the Jacobite insurrection. Rita Donahue is heartbreakingly lovely in her increasing isolation: tender moments with Dallas McMurray, Billy Smith and Noah Vinson dissolve as the men fly off into the wings, and she kneels and bows her head in the fading light.

Earlier, the fleet-footed, free-spirited Laurel Lynch refused to be pinned down by admirers as “Sally in our alley.” That said, she and Donahue appear to have made a pretty wild night of it with the boys at the local tavern in “Come fill, fill, my good fellow/… and let us have one bottle more”: racing and tumbling and hitchkicking with increasing abandon – every damn footfall in perfect time to the music of course, this being Mark Morris – until they all collapse from exhaustion.

Baritone Daniel Pickens-Jones, tenor Jonathan Smucker and soprano Angela Arnold – all members of the local Philharmonia Chorale, joined the MMDG Music Ensemble in a bracing rendition of the Beethoven.

The hint of daffiness that permeates The Muir blossoms into lunacy in A Wooden Tree, an interpretive dance to a selection of Scottish singer-songwriter Ivor Cutler’s peculiar gems, taken mainly from his popular radio programmes of the 1950’s onward. An ensemble of lovable misfits – adults costumed as and behaving much like schoolkids – enact rituals of the absurd to largely nonsensical, faux naïf songs.

Ballet to the People found her mind drifting until Cutler’s weary telegraph operator broke into song in Morse code: “this is my message from the top of the world/ from my little black buzzer beside me/ my bum is cold and my face is white/ it’s very very cold up here/ d- d- d- d- d- d- da dit dit/ dit dit d- da da da…” Meanwhile, Sam Black slumped on the floor, his fingers desperately thumping out the rhythm on the seat of a chair as the ladies of the ensemble skittered and jittered around him in time to the tap-tap-tapping, like electrical sparks. The final woeful “damn the battery’s gone” echoed perfectly our 21st century enslavement to those electronic devices without which we could not possibly make it through our day.

Moments later, the humdrum tale of a family who discover a wooden tree in their back yard is elevated to a joyous tribal dance. But ennui sets in once again as Black and Jenn Weddell sit staring blankly at each other, to the accompaniment of Cutler’s plaintive warbling: “You are the centre of your little world and I am of mine/ Now and again we meet for tea, we’re two of a kind/ This is our universe, cups of tea/ We have a beautiful cosmos, you and me.”

An artless programming decision closed the evening with Festival Dance, a perky ensemble work to a piano trio by Hummel, whose endless riffs on social dance, while delightful, wore thin after similar inventions abounded in the prior Scottish numbers. Morris’ trademark musicality and whimsy could not make up for the finite charms of all those long drawn out sessions of Scottish reeling.

The evening was a sensation nevertheless, thanks to Jenn and Spencer – the knockout pas de deux originally set on Jenn Weddell and Spencer Ramirez – danced last night by Weddell and Sam Black. Morris rarely bothers with extended male-female pairings, but the world would be considerably less bleak if he did. Stephanie Sleeper costumed the striking, statuesque Weddell in an alluring low-backed gown of rose silk and Black in a dress shirt and grey slacks. The couple circle each other warily, like gladiators, or bull and matador. They lift their right arms menacingly with flattened palms, as they speed up and tighten the circle. Their interactions occupy a strange yet somehow familiar border territory between tenderness and hostility, and they go for long stretches without looking at each other, even though body parts may be entangled. An overwhelming reminder that even in our most intimate relationships we are, terrifyingly, alone – reinforced by the shattering score, Henry Cowell’s 1925 Suite for Violin and Piano, brilliantly executed by Georgy Valtchev on violin and Yegor Shevtsov on piano.

We sense a shared tragedy as Weddell and Black link arms and stride and stumble along an elliptical path, staring terrifiedly over their shoulders at some invisible horror. Moments later, he lowers her to the floor where she makes a weird species of snow angel.

In a perversion of a balletic promenade, Black grabs one of Weddell’s ankles and attempts to anchor her as she revolves in violent twists around her own axis, and in a circle around him, her head and shoulders scraping the ground as her hips and back arch desperately in the air.

Though we’ve come to expect unexpected endings from Morris, the explosion at the end of Jenn and Spencer still comes as a shock. The couple are spinning in a kind of mad, amphetamine-fueled tango then suddenly… it’s over.

The adoring Berkeley audience gave Morris and company a much-deserved standing ovation. (Most have been faithful followers over the many years MMDG has made its West Coast home at Cal Performances.) Fittingly, Morris bounded on stage in his version of a Scottish tartan: plaid Bermuda shorts.

Mark Morris Dance Group continues its season at Cal Performances in Berkeley through Sunday September 28th.

Photos:
1. Bay Area première of Mark Morris’ The Muir (Photo: Richard Termine)
2. Bay Area première of Mark Morris’ Festival Dance (Photo: Amber Star Merkens)
3. Bay Area première of Mark Morris’ Jenn and Spencer (Photo: Stephanie Berger)