I love how clouds are often so dynamic. I was working in the yard yesterday, hoping to cut the grass before what looked like an impending storm. However, every time I looked up I could see wonderful cloud formations. Quickly I grabbed my Phase fitted with an 80mm lens (this is equal to a 50mm on a DSLR) and shot this series of photos. The bright sun was a bit tricky to shoot, especially with clouds passing in front,  but I settled on 1/1000 sec at f6.3 (Iso35). Shooting in manual I then could just adjust the aperture to cut back the amount of light when the sun came out. I wanted to expose for those bright highlights, but careful not to let them blow out.

It is much easier to darken an image than it is to lighten it as far more detail and tones are stored in the brights than the darks, provided you do not over-expose. Once you over-expose there are no details left to recover.

I shot these series of images in under a minute! The clouds were swirling in fast. I really liked the gap between these clouds when all of a sudden they seemed to briefly kiss and were then gone.

The detail you see is really there, the medium format Phase just is able to capture it.

I have used the new version of Capture One to add some clarity, structure and contrast. Then I used Nik ColorEfex with a “bleach-bypass” filter to further emphasise those wonderful crazy textures.

Kissing Clouds 1

Kissing Clouds 2

Kissing Clouds 3

Kissing Clouds 4

Kissing Clouds 5