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A Storm Passes Quietly
26 April 2021
The remnants of some wicked weather in Asia passed softly over us yesterday, sprinkling the city with some much needed rain. By this morning only a few passing clouds were left.
Storm Passing Quietly. Captured with a Nikon D300 with 18-200mm Nikkor at 44mm (66mm equivalent) and f8, 1/125 second and ISO 200. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw.
It was enough of a storm to make driving hazardous, though. Our tires slipped at every intersection we had stopped for a red light when, turning green, we slipped into first and tried to get moving again. Oil on the pavement.
This morning, stumbling out of bed to get an early start on the week, we considered the various options for heating water to make coffee, picked one and, while it was coming up to temperature, we marveled at the clouds passing south over the Pacific.
Somehow what we saw on the viewfinder was not rewarding.
While the water was heating, we grabbed the camera we had shot the ancient coffee grinder with and lined up a few shots.
Somehow what we saw on the viewfinder was not rewarding.
The clouds we could see with our eyes were hardly visible, the foreground all too prominent. We kept shooting anyway, half awake, the cobwebs clouding our own internal landscape.
Later, half the cup of coffee warming us in the bunker where the temperature was still in the forties, we realized we had left the camera in manual mode, set for flash exposure.
But being champions of the editing process, we gave the first shot a go in Camera Raw. And, as we expected, the Raw file came to life.
As drama goes, you can't beat black and white, so we tried a monochrome version once we had a color version we liked. But we preferred the color. After a storm, the sun floods the world with color, after all. It's before the storm that a black and white rendering has the most impact.
Not that you can tell a before from an after. But the coffee had not yet dissipated our mind of dreams when that thought floated by.