By Steve Freeman | 2024-05-11
Hummingbird and Sunset Storm Cloud
On 05/13/2024 07:38 pm by Christoph Stopka| Wet Mountain Valley, Colorado USA
I have been a photographer for a long time, doing mostly Nature photography. And I have taken many strange or unusual photos over the years. But this image I shot last evening has to be one of the weirdest photos I have ever taken. I was walking with our two dogs on our property right at sunset. South of us was a gigantic storm cloud, billowing over the valley. The sunset light reflected off the monstrous Cloud in a multitude of intense colors - from yellow and orange to purple and the cloud looked actually more like a nasty Jellyfish floating in the sky. I felt that I needed to document this bizarre cloud in a photo, but had only my trusty iphone with me, even though I would have preferred to have my big DSLR to get the shot. But by the time I would have been back at our house, the magic illumination of the cloud would have probably faded away. So, I quickly took a few photos with my phone, purposely underexposing by 0.7 stops, to make the colors pop a bit more. The cloud monster kept changing colors like an octopus in the sky, depending on how much light was able to get find gaps in a bank of clouds, blocking the sunset rays in the West. It was truly mesmerizing! Eventually the colors did fade very quickly, leaving the cloud floating pale and boring further South. But when I walked back to the house and checked the photos I had shot, I realized that in one of the photos I hummingbird had photo bombed me, perfectly in the middle of the image with light filtering almost 3D-like through the wings of the bird! Definitely one of the most unusual photos I have ever taken...
Iphone 14 Pro Max
Minor adjustments (Sharpen, Shadows) in LIghtroom