What is cloud collecting?

You might well think that cloud collecting sounds like a ridiculous idea. How can anyone collect such ephemeral and free-spirited things as clouds? Surely, they’re just about as uncollectable as anything gets.

Magicked into being by the inscrutable laws of the atmosphere, clouds exist in a state of constant flux, shifting effortlessly from one form to another. One moment, they’re joining and spreading into undulating layers. The next, they’re breaking into torn shreds. One moment, they’re building upwards in enormous, weighty towers with dark, brooding bases. The next, they’re cascading back down in delicate, translucent streaks. And then they’re gone – shedding their moisture as rain or just evaporating into the blue. They’re like expressions on the face of the sky, and certainly not candidates for a display case. Given all the possible things you might consider collecting, clouds would seem to be a completely rubbish option.

But that’s where you’re wrong. You don’t have to own something to collect it. You don’t even have to hold it. You just have to notice it and record it.

The Cloud Collector’s Handbook acts as a complement to the photographs you take of the sky. Of course, you don’t have to take pictures to add clouds to your collection, but few cloudspotters can resist.

While it may not have the tactile quality of a collection of coins, nor the swapability of one of rare stamps, there’s something honest about a collection of clouds. They embody the impermanence of the world around us. ‘Nature’, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.’