Annie Leymarie (member number 828) tells us that Station Luxembourg in Paris is covered in clouds. Artist, Sandrine Alouf, has created a photographic installation, which runs along the RER B platforms of the station. “By showing clouds on the Paris Metro,” explains Alouf, “I intend to give them a new life and to create an installation of visual poetry.” Can’t argue with that.
http://www.a-ciel-ouvert.com/

Do you live in a dungeon without a window? Don’t worry – you can still enjoy the gentle drift of cumulus by tunrning your TV into a tool for meteorological meditation.
‘Colorcalm Skies’ is a DVD of ever-changing, calming cloudscapes to play in the background as you practice your yoga, realign your chakras or just have a row with your partner. You can choose from a range of different coloured backgrounds and music to suit your mood. Stop watching Big Brother and turn your TV into a temple to cloudgazing.
Colorcalm Skies is available from:
http://colorcalm.com/main.php

Just when you thought you had to go all the way to Cape Town, South Africa, to see the famous Tablecloth Cloud that forms on top of Table Mountain, some kind fellows have put up a 24-hour webcam. You can watch this ‘orographic’ cloud spread out across the mountain plateau from the comfort of your home. Essential viewing for lazy cloudspotters.
Go to the Table Mountain webcam at http://midafricam.co.za/main/content/view/16/39/lang,en/

A computer game with no winners and losers? One in which you just fly around making clouds? It can only have come from students at the University of Southern California, dude…
http://intihuatani.usc.edu/cloud/

Those who yearn for a little more depth to their cloud photographs should take a look at the 3D photography of Luc de Rop, a member from Sinaai, Belgium. Finally, something worthwhile to look at with those silly glasses that you saved from the back of a cereal packet*…
Go to Luc de Rop’s site

* You can also get the 3D effect with the use of a small mirror.

Every cloudspotter should be familiar with the sage words of the english Victorian art critic, John Ruskin, so we have put up an
excerpt from ‘Modern Painters’ in which he wonders, as do we, why people don’t look up more…

March 13th sees building work begin on the Italian Government’s Congress Centre in Rome. Suspended in the centre of the new building, which is designed by the Roman architect, Massimiliano Fuksas, will be an enormous ‘cloud’ made of teflon. The cloud will glow from within, and will contain an auditorium.

This will hold up to 1800 people. Nevertheless, we feel it necessary to warn the local government that there will be chaos when every 5-year-old in Rome turns up and wants to go inside to finally see what it’s like to stand inside a cloud.
more info and images…

see:http://www.newhouse.com/archive/sefton022306.html

Wilson A. Bentley, attracted world attention with his pioneering work in the area of photomicrography, most notably his extensive work with snow crystals (commonly known as snowflakes). By adapting a microscope to a bellows camera, and years of trial and error, he became the first person to photograph a single snow crystal in 1885.
To read about Bentley, visit:
http://www.snowflakebentley.com/index.htm

We have recently seen a sneak preview of a new photography book called ‘Recognize’ by Glen E. Friedman.

Legendary photographer, Glen E. Friedman, made his name in the 1980s photographing the likes of the Beastie Boys (when they were just an emerging talent) and the cream of rap artists on Def Jam recordings. His photography books include ‘DogTown – The Legend Of The Z-Boys’, charting the emergence of skate culture in West Coast America, and he co-produced the seminal feature-length documentary on the same subject, ‘DogTown and Z-Boys’.

We are very pleased that Friedman should turn his attention to photographing our fluffy friends in all their respendent glory. The shots are, pure and simple, majestic cloudscapes unsullied by any piffling little distractions like the ground.

Recognize by Glen E. Friedman is published in the US, and available from amazon.com. We highly recommend it.

We were sent a book called ‘Wind Blown Clouds’ compiles by Alec Findlay. With it, he sent the following message:

‘Since 1999 I have run an artist participation project titled Wind Blown Clouds, collecting slide photos from around the globe.I am about to publish a 228 page anthology of them (Wind Blown Clouds) with Rizzoli in NYC. This also features some haiku about clouds.’

and invited cloud photographers to contribute:

‘You are invited to contribute to an anthology of ‘wind blown clouds’. Take a colour slide-photograph of a wind blown cloud. Include
a note of the date and place the slide was taken, your name and postal address.

There is no limit to the number of clouds that you can submit. The clouds will appear in a forthcoming anthology.’

Alec Findlay,
morning star
Off Quay Building
Foundry Lane
Byker
Newcastle-upon-Tyne NE6 1LH
alecfinlay@yahoo.com

Ever looked out the window and wished you knew the name of the clouds looking back at you?

Of course you have.

Well, help is at hand – in the form of The Skywatcher’s Cloud Chart. With photographs and captions by John A Day, author of The Book of Clouds, it is the chart of choice for the American Meteorological Society and the Weather Channel, and a worthwhile addition to any cloudspotter’s wall.

Following extensive and hard-nosed negotiation, members of The Cloud Appreciation Society can buy it from Jack Borden’s For Spacious Skies website at the reduced price of $11.45 + postage. For those in the US, that means a total of $13.95. It is large, laminated and sent in a sturdy cardboard tube so, for members outside of the US, postage is considerably more.

Just quote your membership number when you order from http://www.forspaciousskies.com.

Inspired by Marc Kremers’ sky diary (see below), Valeska Oostrum has started her own, showing the skies above her home village of De Lier in The Netherlands (it is between Rotterdam and The Hague).
You can visit Valeska’s sky diary here.

Marc Kremers, from London, kept a ‘sky diary’ last year. He used his camera phone to take a snap of the sky above him about four times a day over a period of several months. He wanted to see just how grey the skies over London really were, and to record how they changed with the seasons. The results of Marc’s sky diary are here:
http://tex-server.org/work/photographs/phone
/t610/theskyabovemarc/index.html
What a great idea. We’d love to see similar records of the skies above other cities of the world. If cloudspotters feel inspired to use camera phones to record their own sky diaries and they put them online as Marc has, we’ll add a link for others to see.
Send your sky diaries to:
hello@cloudappreciationsociety.org

No one could agree where they had formed and everyone claimed to have been the photographer. We decided to investigate…

Read more The Mystery Storms

The question of what music to listen to while gazing at the clouds has finally been solved. Nicolas Reeves, a professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada, has invented The Cloud Harp – an instrument that creates music from the shape of the clouds above it. So far, it has played in six cities around the world – Amos and Montreal (Canada), Lyon (France), Hamburg (Germany), Gizycko (Poland), and Pittsburgh (US).

When the sky is blue, the harp is silent, but with the first appearance of clouds above it, the music begins. “It uses a lidar,” explains Reeves, “which is a laser beam directed at the clouds. Whatever bounces back to the instrument is measured and gives us an idea of the brightness of the cloud, as well as its height.” A controller, known as a ‘cloudist’, configures the instrument so that this information triggers and controls particular musical sounds. He then leaves it to play the music of the clouds to passers by.

Sometimes musicians are brought in to provide orchestrations by recording the samples that the harp plays.“It means that we can play the clouds of St Louis, Missouri, through an arrangement by Helmut Finski of Montreal,” explains Reeves.

In Amos, in Northern Quebec, the Cloud Harp was installed in the clearing of a park, surrounded by trees. “When there was a full moon,” Reeves remembers, “people brought their sleeping bags and stayed the night next to the harp. They just lay there listening to the clouds – it was fantastic.”

See more about The Cloud Harp at
www.cloudharp.org.

We were very excited to be contacted by the one and only John Day of Oregon, USA. He is commonly known as the Cloudman, as he has devoted his latter years to photographing, enthusing about and explaining the clouds. His website is full of fantastic images and information. We recommend it highly.
Indeed, eagle-eyed cloudspotters will notice that society founder, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, was filmed reading John Day’s book in the first of his short programmes about clouds and the Morning Glory. The fact that he fell asleep having read it should not be taken as evidence that it is anything other than a great book.
Visit John Day’s website:http://www.cloudman.com

Soon-to-be-member, John Diefenbach, is based in Japan and has filmed the world’s last mainline steam trains, which operate in Inner Mongolia. Filming in mid-winter, with temperatures down to -30C, the steam effects, in some cases, are spectacular. We told him that we are cloudspotters, not train spotters, but it is fair to say that there is not much difference between what comes out of the train’s funnel and a time-lapse image of a cumulus cloud. Similar to the case of the UPS cloud stamps mentioned below, John’s films will be the ultimate for cloud enthusiasts who are also train nerds.
See John’s films at:
http://www.bachsitetoo.com

We were contacted recently by the venerable Jack Borden, Boston TV news reporter turned sky enthusiast. At the age of 45 he woke up from a nap in a nature preserve to see a sky he had never experience in all his previous life. “In a millisecond I saw more of the sky than in all my life to that point,” he says. He decided to quit his job and become a missionary of the sky. For Spacious Skies is the campaign he’s been running for twenty years or so to get school children and everyone else to pay more attention to what’s going on above us.
http://www.forspaciousskies.com/

If you are a cloudspotter who collects stamps, prepare to have an orgasm. The US Postal Service has issued a set of stamps starring fifteen different types of cloud. All basic genera are featured except, that is, for the nimbostratus. But then it is a bit of a wet, wingey cloud, so we guess it’s fair enough.

There’s nothing quite as mesmerizing as watching time-lapse clouds.