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Twin Peaks
19 January 2023
We were on the west side of Twin Peaks during a break between January storms when we saw these clouds dancing over Eureka Peak (left) and Noe Peak. We stopped to listen to the music.
Twin Peaks. Olympus E-PL1 with 14-42mm II R kit lens at 42mm (84mm equivalent), f20, 1/80 second and ISO 200.
We exposed for the hills, letting the sky go and hoping we could recover it in post processing since we always capture Raw data. And when we converted the image to monochrome, that's exactly what happened.
Here's what we were looking at on the monitor:
Camera JPEG. The thumbnail stored with the Raw file.
The f20 aperture was an inadvertent mistake. We thought we were shooting at f11. And the 1/80 second exposure barely saved the shot. It worked in color but the sky was a dreadful blue and the clouds we had barely noticed became more prominent.
But the more we saw of them, the more we liked the clouds.
We'd at first been attracted to the shape of the hills, three of them (not just two). The last on the south apparently unnamed and little regarded but obvious both in this shot and when you're up there.
The line of the hills seemed to move with the silent music the clouds were dancing to, as if they were partners. And casting both in monochrome brought them out as equal partners.
There was no wind. They might have continued on long enough to be dancing with the stars.