Tuesday Joe and I noticed that the clouds were becoming more and more spectacular as evening approached so we walked down to the marina and sat on the single bench out toward the end of the dock. I had carried my camera and took pictures during a forty-minute period starting just before the sun dipped below the horizon at 6:03 until it became too dark to shoot without a tripod. As we sat in awe remarking on the shapes of clouds, the changing light, and reflections in the water, the colors gradually changed and deepened from palest yellows and rose contrasted with intense ultramarine to darker and dustier salmon, lavender, and mauve. Joe turned and spied a huge thunderhead building in the east.“Look at that cloud bloom,” he said, as the sun struck the cloud tops pushing at the upper reaches of the troposphere with purest white, and the boiling cumulonimbus embedded deep in the lower depths of atmosphere painted yellow and orange, I thought that it would be difficult for the camera to capture that which the human eye so easily grasped. However, upon downloading and looking at the images last evening, I realized that the camera lens had framed those spectacular towers so as to help focus attention on the subtle passages of color and asymmetrical perfection.
