The Sky Can Change Quickly!

About a week and a half ago, we had four or five days of nearly constant rain.  Sometimes the sun would peek out, but generally, we just has lots and lots of rainy boring weather.

While this was going on, we had absolutely phenomenal clouds coming and going, but not much sun getting through to really make them look great.  I don't mind gloomy and dark clouds (they do make for some great photos), but I really wanted some sun with these clouds. 

During one of the days where the rain had stopped and the clouds were still around, I left the house close to sunset trying to capture these clouds along with the sun, and I think that caught a good shot.

I saw a pretty decent formation of clouds, and then the sun started to peek out a little bit, so I started setting up my camera.

The final result is below, and I was kind of lucky.  When I started setting up for the shot, it was a decent looking scene, but not spectacular.  I almost went back to the car to keep scouting.

In a very short time, the sun lowered just enough to go behind the low clouds without penetrating, making them look very dark and gloomy.  But the sun wasn't low enough yet to do the same to those high clouds.

The result was pretty amazing and the whole scene opened up as shown below very fast.  It looked really neat to have both dark and gloomy clouds along with clouds that were very well illuminated in the same frame.  And then those beams of light started to also spray upwards right about when I was ready to shoot!

This moment only lasted about 30 seconds.  It didn't take very long for this scene to completely change as the clouds moved and the sun set.  It's really amazing how scenes like this can exist for such a short time period.

(ISO 100, 24mm, f10, 1/100 sec)

Thanks for looking!

Brian