This is my favorite of the batch, really capturing the rainbow colors as the sunlight refracted through the ice clouds. The blueness of the sky really comes through also.
On Tuesday morning at about 8:30am when I let the dog out in the backyard, I saw a thunderstorm building towards the east near Hurlburt Field and Fort Walton Beach. The rising sun was behind the storm clouds and shining through some ice clouds, causing some pretty diffractions. This gave me some good opportunity to play with our new camera.
I ran inside, grabbed the camera, ran back outside, uncapped the lens…and everything fogged up.
Argh!
This is an issue here. Bring a 75F camera outside into warmer 100% humidity and you will get condensation on the lenses. After last week’s adventures at the butterfly house with the fogging lenses, I had ordered some anti-fog lens cloths from Amazon (along with a spare battery and some other maintenance supplies). I hadn’t received that order by Tuesday morning (it arrived 6 hours later), so all I could do was stand outside and wait for the lens to clear up.
I was getting impatient, hoping the clouds would continue to cooperate for me…it took about 3-4 minutes before I could get clear pictures.
What I was attempting to photograph were “iridescent clouds“, which occur when ice crystal clouds are between your eyes and the sun. Learn more about atmospheric optic phenomena here. There’s all kinds of great stuff to see!
This storm moved east of us, but later that morning we had our own thunderstorm come in from the Pensacola area. Right after I took these pictures I had gone out for a run (with the kids on their bikes) and we had come home right when it started raining.
Enjoy some of the color variations I could get from my viewing spot in my backyard. No post-processing was done with these pictures, they’re coming to you straight off the SD card. The first picture is my favorite of the batch, zoomed in…
The full storm, this is facing east in my backyard. You can see the ice clouds on the right.
Playing with the settings some. I think this was the silhouette setting.
Hi-saturation.
Low saturation.
The refractive effects have nearly dissipated…as the thicker clouds began to dominate.
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