Eduard Eduardovich Lind spotted these Stratocumulus clouds on a winter’s day about a hundred years ago over Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, China. He belonged to the community known as Harbin Russians who first migrated to the area at the end of the nineteenth century to work on the Chinese Eastern Railway. Lind, whose name in Russian is written Эдуард Эдуардович Линд, moved there in 1920. His photograph reminds us how modern-day cloudspotters have it easy with their smartphone cameras. Lind would likely have stood shivering on the snowy banks of the Songhua River using a large-format camera with bellows mounted on a cumbersome tripod and incorporating a photographic plate that he later processed himself. Thanks to his tenacity in capturing a fleeting moment on a passing day a century ago in the far eastern reaches of China, Lind’s wintry cloudscape still inspires a sympathetic shiver.
The photograph now hangs on the wall of Lind’s grandson Michael Milenko (Member 35,154) in Sydney, Australia, where the Russian cloudspotter subsequently migrated to in 1956.