Month: June 2019

Nephology…

the study or contemplation of clouds.

mammatus clouds

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.

John Muir

I love a good storm. There’s something about it that makes you feel alive. It engages all of your senses in a way that never happens on a sunny, clear day.

Clouds scud across the sky and if you’re lucky some of the more unusual cloud formations appear. These mammatus clouds appeared ever so briefly, perhaps 4 minutes, but it was amazing to watch them develop and slip away into a swirl of gray.

So excited to add them to my ever growing collection of clouds.

I do go on sometimes…

but not today.

black and white crepuscular rays shooting out from a cloud

I planted my self in the middle of a great many Glasses full of Dew, tied fast about me, upon which the Sun so violently darted his Rays, that the Heat, which attracted them, as it does the thickest Clouds, carried me up so high, that at length I found my self above the middle Region of the Air.

Cyrano de Bergerac

It’s been a great week and today I’m just feeling really content. Good news abounded and nature threw in some beauties as well. This image of crepuscular rays was also an EarthSky “Today’s Image”, always an honor for me and a good reminder of why it’s important to carry your camera with you.

Birds flying high…

you know how I feel

soaring white pelicans black and white

Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.

Douglas Coupland

What a beautiful sight to see. These giant birds soaring high up in the thermals.

Photographs so often trigger memories and I was reminded of a summer day in Miami training with my Search and Rescue team. I was “dogless” as I was still waiting for my bloodhound to be shipped down from Washington state so my assignment was to join a member of the ultralight team that we had partnered with to fly in an ultralight.

We had staged a missing person scenario and I would be spotting from the air and reporting back to our dog teams.

It turned out to be an amazing experience and as I watched the pelicans high above me I had just the slightest sense of their freedom.

This weekend is a special one and I’ll take this as a sign!