Black and White Thread
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BRAVO Hans! Many an encore I hope! Below is an example of something I do during monsoon; brave the 100f + with high humidity and explore the towering nimbus…with out rope,pinions nor spikes. Sometimes I go bare foot with zoom telephoto. Just know where the ants are. anyway, B&W turns these towering clouds into mountains, cliffs and valleys: oriental in orientation.
Sky Mountain of the Pileus Palace.
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Beautiful mountain to climb bare footed Michael.
Reading about contrail in anther thread I think the next one will be appropriate. I took this picture just a few days ago. The contrail was dissipating rather fast and it also formed some von Karman vortex like patterns before disappearing.
Barbed wire
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Hello Michael, you inspire me with this undulating asperitas to B&W (as a verb) more candidates. Aspiritas loves B&W, that’s for sure. I experimented with some pictures of crepescular rays and it turns out to be really fun. I am surprised ever again what B&W can do with some extra contrast.
Here is a view on a pond with some reed.
Anyone else who wants to jump in?
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Hans..Getting the contrast right is so important.Clouds pop out and depth is established with good contrast control. But it isn’t just that. There is, range in the gray scale control ,and for what desired affect. As per below,there is no absolute black nor pure white in the shot. It is about the subtlety of the gray scale to demonstrate a mystical , i suppose, ethereal sense to the pic. Your pond pic with the misty gray clouds like fog does the same for me. Also, details in the shadows and in the hilites can be lost for the sake of ” contrast”. Some camera critics, say the one thing digital Nikons have over Canon is the Range of the CMOS used. Yet good processing after the shot can achieve desired results.
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Wow Michael, this picture is very beautiful. I would use the same words to describe it as you did. I am impressed and I am going to study on the way to get these grays while maintaining some sort of sharpness and detail in it. Enchanting.
It reminded me of a picture I posted to the gallery.
https://cloudappreciationsociety.org/gallery/photo/photo-n-3592-x-2
It is not – but almost – black and white in reality. I only deepened the shadows a bit and that gave some extra contrast but it has not the lightness of your example. It is challenging to experiment in the way you showed now. To be continued.
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Hans, That above pic was a difficult one to say the least. The sky was a flat stratus . When the mammatus began to show there was not enough contrast for the auto focus to work with. So I went to manual focus and as you can imagine I was lucky to get one good shot. Thats another feature of digital. Its very inexpensive to shoot a lot of pics in order to get one good one.
Any monochromatic, one color, photograph becomes a challenge. Using White Balance means calibrating to a white source at every session, something cloud photography doesn’t always give time for. So having various pre programed shooting parameters is what i like. Various levels of contrast , saturation, etc at ones finger tips is great and over time with use one learns the best to use at appropriate times.
That brings up another observation. It took a fair amount of processing the pic to try to capture ethereal of it all..yet comparing the pic as it is on my screen , with the same pic as it is posted here, there is a difference. I’ve noticed this with my pics. They are slightly darker here. Not a big issue but something to be aware of; the subjectivity of the medium we are dealing with. Not everyone’s screen is calibrated so there will variances. At times I remember to give a pic just abit more ‘ light” to offset the bit of darkening that happens when posted here. So,all that we may go thru can’t be taken too seriously, unless we are printing these pics for display then its just the damned printer that has to be calibrated and adjusted and kept full of ink etc.
So yes, experimenting is a lot of what we do. Exploring clouds with the new inexpensive digital tools opens the field up to a whole lot more people. Digital photography is the peoples art. ( Hint for CAS Members to jump in with the fun.)
Below, Went with a lot of white, hilights. Seemed appropriate for seeing clouds.
I SEE CLOUDS
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Yeah, he seems to see us too and it looks very serious!
Thank you Michael for you explanation of the process to come up with the former subtle result. It comforts me in a certain way that it wasn’t easy at all, but the result is even more impressive knowing about the process. Often pictures of an interesting cloud structure turn out to be rather dull and grey at first sight after uploading, but you know for certain it was different when you spotted it and it is the art of getting out of the raw picture what you attracted at first sight.
You are right, digital photography is the peoples art. It opened a lot of possibilities without the cost of the analogous process. It is true fun. Experimenting, learning, repeating and over again.
Strange undulations that aspire to asperitas
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Hans, Ok, for the sake of alliteration I’ll give you that, but to me that looks like asperitas definitely
When clouds are duplicatus..layers of different types stacked on top of each other, I have fun with the camera. I never know exactly what I’m going to get. There is fun in that. Lighting is varied from layer to layer. Direction of Movement is varied. etc. At some point I find myself ,,just taking pics rather than seeing a thought out photo. I tend to look for general patterns and construct around highlites using average exposure and contrast rather than anything too specific. Seldom have I been disappointed with this approach to shooting duplicatus. Recently I stumbled upon an entire session of shooting up thru duplicatus, that I had ,,umm, forgotten about. All of it is in the vein of abstract. The shot below is for your entertainment. Feel free to drag it to your screen and make as big as you want. ( suggested)
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I like to read about your approach of duplicatus Michael. The example you added is very nice. I blew it up as you suggested but when looking from a distance it turns out to be even surprising.
Thinking about what my approach might be, I come to the conclusion that I am always looking for strange structures or striking compositions whether duplicatus or not, whether abstract or not. All doing by scanning the sky with my camera for parts that looks promising.
This is one taken with a wide angle (16 mm). Left under a part of the 22 degrees halo could have been seen when I didn’t make it a B&W version.
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That was a quite mystical one to end the year with Michael. The few lighter spots give it a special feel. Beautiful.
Unfortunately, the new year starts here (the Netherlands) with stratus and drizzle as in Devon, England. So no picture on your “New Year Day’s Clouds” thread.
I want to start the new year with a White and Black one in stead of an Black and White one. The negative has so to say the right positive appearance to start with.
Happy new year to all who reads this!
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Love it! The picture seems to have only three or four distinctive grays and the shapes form a kind of a jigsaw cloudscape. Very surprising.
I found on the forum the former thread with black and whites started in January 2015 and ended in March 2015. It is a pity that the pictures can’t be seen anymore. It was fun reading the thread.
I mentioned some experiments with White an Black. Here is the positive of the one that surprised me.
A dissipating lacunosus formation.
And this is the negative, but has all the features of a positive of a clouded sky, a bit mamma-like.
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I’ve been a silent viewer of these pictures for a long time and just wanted to say how much I enjoy looking at how the clouds shift personalities in B&W. Some of my favorites are the minimalist ones, but all are quite interesting to look at! Thanks for sharing.
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Why Thank You Kristy! Words of encouragement every now and then never hurt.
I’ll repeat what I’ve said all along and I’m speaking for myself only. Feel free to click and drag on any of my fotos and put them on your desk top or wherever. Please do enlarge them to whatever size you can get away with. The larger the better imho. If You Do Find a picture you would like to make a print of or would want to make even larger than what you can off of desktop, let me know and I’ll send you electronically a jpeg or pds file of it.
Below is a shot up through a break in the clouds during a bit of storm:another world up there.
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Thank you too Kristy. It is really nice to read that you like this thread on the forum.
Pictures indeed tend to shift personality when transformed to black and white. It is Michael who infected me with the B&W virus (of course good-natured). I missed the former thread with clouds in black and white (also started by Michael) not being involved yet at that time. The pictures of that thread are unfortunately no more available.
Also: no problem sending pictures.
And I huff and I puff …..
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This is one of my favourites: the cirrocumulus with the fine structure, details and rippling like here on your Thread Bare. I have been thinking about the translation and meaning of the title Thread Bare. I could not associate the delicateness of the structure with something worn off. Maybe you have something else in mind?
I would like to react with something that looks definitely worn off.
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Michael and Hans, your astonishing cloud portraits keep calling me back to breathe in their beauty. And your titles, poetic, clever, evocative. Thank you for sharing visions that inspire and delight! I wonder what you might call this one, Feathers and Fur? It reminds me of Maya Angelou’s poem in which she sagely notes, “We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.”
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Thank You Keelin For Your Kind Words. Its Difficult at times to take real credit for these shots because alls I do is record them. Theres a craft to that and it has been made a lot more universally accessible by digital, yet, sometimes I feel poor and weak in comparison to what I have photographed.
An example may be Han’s dissipating lacunosus. Countless times I’ve been fooled by my own photos, assuming a billow when it was dissipation. Theres a good reason to take notes when photographing.
Yet,If clouds would only give me time to look away and jot something down. In the desert here weather systems pass thru very quickly. The only weather that may hang around for days is the cloudless high pressure blue sky . Wind is our common ” alike” from Huff and Puff to Feathers and Fur to the photo below. The Thread Bare above is thin and made ragged by the various winds. The wind below has a strong forceful obvious presence yet the horizontal clouds across the bottom seem totally oblivious. Enough wind from me, hope to see more from all, Enjoy!
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I am sorry Keelin, to mistake you for some Patricia. I must have lost the thread so to speak. I hope you forgive me using the wrong name in my former reply.
Wow, what a play of lines Michael and what a play of light Keelin in your last two pictures. Lots of credits for both! (By the way, there is more to this than recording Michael, you must have “the eye” for it.) It is really fun exchanging wonderful impressions of clouds this way.
I will have to produce more candidates for this thread very soon. Although I don’t live in a desert like Michael (must be beautiful in a different way) we often have to endure a featureless gray of any kind of stratus or low hanging clouds, often leaving their burden of water on our heads mainly in this season of year. No complaints however, there is enough variety in the weather with the seasons (not to speak of change because the actual change on a global scale is of an unwanted, unprecedented and dangerous nature).
So here is a flower to present….
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Thank you, Hans, for the exquisite flower! The softness of it reminds me of the image below.
You both have such a keen eye! It just goes to show that, no matter where we live, the sky is full of wonders that keep our heads atilt.
PS: And there’s no need to apologize, dear Hans. You weren’t mistaken — and sorry for confusion. A small breeze came along and morphed me into Keelin! Actually, I just prefer going by my last name socially and didn’t realize my first would automatically be used for display, so it drifted away yesterday.
Feathery flights from celestial pillow fights
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loving all the pics in this thread…thanks for sharing them on here
I joined in 2011 and this is the first time ive had a browse in here
I took this one a couple of days ago
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hi there Michael….heres how to add an avatar
log in…my account…..account details
scroll down to avatar and click on the pencil in top right hand corner
another box opens which you just click on to add image
find the image you wish to add and click on it
when it appears in the box click on the tick on the bottom right
once you have done this click on the save changes box down below
now this will appear as your avatar
good luck….hope this helps and all the best
keep posting more pics…its great to browse in here
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Lovely distortion…. Naturally Surreal ….. inspired on Gala, the muse of Dali?
It is already some pictures back, but Moon wisp is also a very delicate picture with a nocturnal mystery feel in it. And before that one Keelin came up with a Breath of Sky. A delight of light!
So this is the moment to think about the theme Michael started this thread with: “Naturally Surreal”.
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Yes, the Surreal! the other reality between opposites. As Rod Serling use to put it, ” Between Sight and Sound there is a place” I posted a pic or two a good while back of some overhead imaginative and I return to that place with the below. Again with the duplicatus;the frail lacunous under altocumulous.
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Thank you Keelin. I tried to post a new picture, but like Michael this does not work properly anymore. The uploading process ends with a message 100% complete en then … nothing happens.
…. clouds in my coffee too……
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Thanks Gavin. Sorry to interrupt your Sunday. I speak for myself; i communicate the problem so CAS is aware of it, but I intend no urgency in the communication. I mean…clouds..right? Like there isn’t enough at this site to keep one with Clouds for a long while. New additions,like a fine bottle of wine or Cuban Cigar, can only get better with time. So, anyway, Thank you much for getting to the bottom of the upload problem…I’ll have to remember that if I ever have a download problem,;)
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I agree Michael. It is addictive.
Your rotated picture seems to rotate itself….
Like you I found myself digging in my archive of pictures. In some occasions I found details in pictures – not that much appealing as a whole – that turned out to be very interesting. Later…
This is one I made with the Cloudspotter app.
Fan
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Hans , Yes I make it a practice to give pics ” time”. After the first rush to process the selected best from a session, I may go a few days before getting back to any more processing. Time seems to validate if I was successful or not in photographing what ever was in my mind. And true, it may take a long while to ” see” what interested me in the first place.This one I’ve enjoyed for a while. Time for a public viewing.
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I like the layers and patterns in this picture Michael.
This processing in mind and time of some pictures I do recognize. Often I take a picture because something strikes me and afterwards the result seems not to be what I had in mind or thought to see. And then after some time, some evaluating – and also some manipulating – you find back in a detail what interested you at first sight.
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Michael and Hans, these images are fantastic, inspiring continued awe and teasing imagination to new limits. And yet sometimes, clouds seem to do their own storytelling. Below, a whimsical adage:
Little Bear points to a drifting cumulus as Big Bear reminds him in a celestial puff, “This is the stuff of which we are made.”
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Well so much for trying to be clever .. freekin Google….Theres a lion in the clouds and yes its not easy to see it because its made of cloud..And speakin of not easy to see..Hygge,,theres a slider on the far right of the screen. You can go from top to bottom of thread in about 1 . 5 seconds with good mouse to hand to eye co-ordination. But why?when there are all the fun photos of clouds to look at in between? One might see something one hasn’t seen before…like a lion..in the jungle..the mighty jungle ..sleeping tonite..cuz it gotz a full stomach ..burp. ;)
I have many Cloud arrangements as if I were FTD and they are ready for a vase. Below is one of the latest.
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Ah, just some days away and back again I feel welcomed by fantastic new pictures of Little Bear (who can’t sleep?), the Mighty Lion (that sleeps tonite!) and elegant flowers of different kind in a growing bouquet. Let’s keep surprising one another. Love scrolling through this thread no matter whether I have a slider or not.
Distant travelers in a desert storm
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Well this is a real firework of pollen. Although I certainly won’t sneeze from this one, the hay-fever aspect of spring is not what I look forward to. Atchoo! Here hay-fever season is still far enough away since it snows a bit from a solid grey stratus sky and winter seems to be in full strength. Yet I look forward to spring.
Look for the version in true gold on the “sometimes it looks like a fake” thread.
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To my surprise today a picture is added to the gallery of Mike Davies on which contrail with effects of the V.C.I vortex Crow instability. Yesterday I just found information of the Crow instability in contrails because of my search for information about the Holmboe instability (triggered by the ‘Dawn Asperitas’ topic). I also concluded that the two pictures I added to this thread with titles ‘Barbed wire’ and ‘Under Water Or In Space?’ are examples of the same Crow instability. Here is a third one from the same series
Another nice thing to know is that on the picture named ‘Under Water Or In Space?’ you can see the original contrail and a secondary so-called hybrid contrail separated clearly. The secondary contrail appears to be heavier (and therefore also brighter) having larger ice particles that fall faster and so show as two. This is also visible in the picture above. This one was taken earlier so the distance between the two type of contrails is not that big yet.
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Fascinating Crows Work Hans! Perhaps Boeing or Airbus Will design a wing tip that always gives a show like you and Davies captured! If They are going to put stuff across my sky, how nice it would be if it was at least interesting.
Heres a pic that can be rotated and flipped. I break some rules but adhere to just enough to keep it interesting.
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Thank you for widening my eyes and sparking my brain! The cloud varieties and wind effects (Crow and Holmboe) you’ve been describing recently are new to me, and your comments just make we want to learn more. I imagine my brain synapses firing to match some of the images I’ve seen here — like Hans’s Barbed Wire near the top of this thread.
Here’s my brain still in formation…
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Well thank you too Keelin. As a matter of fact I do the same. If there is something new it is fun finding out more about it.
And OOPS that is not your brain to blaim. I do think something is wrong with the upload function. From what I experience today is that the forum seems to be under construction. I already tried earlier to post a picture, but did not succeed. I wait untill it is solved…
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I thought I’d share this picture because of the several things happening at once.
There is fallstreak hole on the left.
Then there is a contrail going across, slowly ascending from mid left to mid right where it’s very bright as it gets closer to the Sun. On the left side, over the altocumulus layer, it’s probably just the contrail shadow. And just above it there is a fine line of dots that I believe to be Crow instability. (Maybe I’m wrong, I learned about this effect from this thread. But see the enlarged shot.)
Finally, on the right bottom corner there is what seems to be some virga that looks like brush strokes.
The sky has been generous this morning, unfortunately I was in a hurry and the iPhone camera can only pick up so much.
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Brains back, haha. I missed the joke the first time I saw your post Keelin.
Beautiful bouquet Michael!
A lot going on on your picture George. The contrail shows indeed Crow instability effects. I do see a lot of contrail where I am living, so this is sometimes observed, but to see it in its most characteristic appearance it needs the right conditions. This is something else I spotted last week.
A moonscape
And some place further in the sky:
Holy cow. Holes were eating up the altocumulus.
Has anyone seen something like this before?
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Easy Hans…Sure! I’ve seen such phenomena. I suspect rising columns of heat make the holes. Something always starts degrading clouds once they reach their peak appearance. Can’t say I have pics tho,,or at least I have no idea where to look for them if I do.
Anyway, we’ve reached just over 100 posts on this thread. Hygge was hinting at 75 or so, that maybe its time for a new thread. Im thinking Vol II . 100 posts is fair especially if you believe ” A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words”..So, this one is my last for this thread, Vol I. Its strange enough to be a memorable one to go out on..another Overhead shot taken from my backyard…with a little contrast and ” clarity” added..;)
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Like Finding A Sea Shell On The Beach
The Feeling of Flight
Too Much Coffee Cloud
Under Water Or In Space?
Hans , Yes I make it a practice to give pics ” time”. After the first rush to process the selected best from a session, I may go a few days before getting back to any more processing. Time seems to validate if I was successful or not in photographing what ever was in my mind. And true, it may take a long while to ” see” what interested me in the first place.
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