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Wednesday Vignette: Cloudscape

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Today I join Anna of Flutter & Hum for Wednesday Vignette. Be sure to click over to her blog to see more inspirational, artistic, or just plain interesting photos. 

This week, I'm actually showing something other than plants (unless you count the silhouetted trees). Leaving work on Monday, I was struck by the complex, intricate clouds ahead of me. They all shared a similar wispy quality, but had taken on all manner of shapes, from the standard "stretched cotton ball" to great sweeping arcs and fascinating zig-zags. The whole assembly seemed slightly to radiate out from a central void, with more distant clouds in the background.


The conditions were, of course, brutal for photography looking right into the sun to try to capture all the detail of the filmy cloudscape. The picture above it nice, but it absolutely falls short of what my eyes saw through polarized sunglasses. Oh to have a DSLR with a polarized filter. So I loaded them onto my computer, intending to play around to achieve a similar effect to what I had seen.

Well, I may have gotten a bit carried away...
Oh look, darling, what a lovely sunset...
Wait, the sky is on fire! That blue glow isn't the sun!
Life as we know it has ended in a massive wave of radiation!

Oh, well. Everyone lost their hair so long ago, no one remembers what they looked like with it. The sky is actually kind of pretty, if a bit eerie.
Nuclear winter. Better bundle up. It's gonna be a cold one.
I just couldn't resist. It's been a long time since I played around with hue and saturation like that. I probably haven't done that since middle school, when I first learned the entertainment of photo manipulation. You have to have a little fun, sometimes, right?

Ok, back to some (sort of) serious photo editing. This next one is a touch more realistic than the last few, sharpened and adjusted only slightly to bring out the detail in the clouds. My favorite part is the lower left quadrant with the squiggly clouds. I'm not sure I've ever seen ones like that before. I realized after I stopped for the picture that it looked better further back on the road, but I wasn't quite committed enough to go back to find that spot again.

And finally, a slightly more enhanced version. This is the last one, I promise. My sunglasses have a slight brown tint, which I usually hate and try to avoid (they were the lesser evil available when I bought them). Anyway, they do add a nice warm tint to everything, so I adjusted this last photo to reflect that. Ha! It's a bit of a rose-colored glasses situation.

Well, I had fun playing with this photo. I hope at least someone else enjoyed seeing the results, even if it was looking at 8 versions of the same photo.


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