Thunder Clouds

The system immediately adjacent (maybe three miles as the crow flies) to these clouds spawned two funnels and consequently a couple of Tornado horns in the suburb directly south of me. As I noted in an earlier post (with the water tower), for some reason all the frontal boundaries seem to roll right over this area.

These clouds were just amazing. I had to stop shooting when the second horn went off but man, I was just captivated. The best part of all: it was right at sunsent and these clouds were directly east of me. Must've popped off 50 shots just like these in the span of four or five minutes. I have tried to work the curves to make them as close to what I saw as possible.

I've deliberately kept the file sizes very small because I may choose to sell these as stock (the whole batch), so there is a tad bit of JPEG banding. If you guys want I can post larger files but hopefully you get the idea.

I'm not sure whats going wrong here with my browser tonight but this is the third time I am replying to this thread and it has not shown up.
This looks and sounds like it was an exhilarating photo shoot. these cloud formations/activity is very dramatic. I like all of these and feel you have done a great job capturing the feel of what must have been awesome. I could not suggest doing anything differently. Well done.
The favorite of mine is the bottom shot, the one with the white and dark clouds with no colors. I think that may be due partly to the fact that it has strong highlights and shadow detail and superb clarity and sharpness. The other two seem to have a slightly washed look about them almost as if you shot the scene through a glass window effect.
I find that reducing the "gamma" setting a bit and then upping the output in the curves can bring out the clarity and get rid of that "glazed " look.
But overall I like these alot. Good shootin . . .

Danke.

You may be right about the exposure / gamma. Perhaps I should just leave as is out of ACR and work the whole thing in Curves instead of just partially in curves. I will say the one in the middle (I call it the cauldron) was not as vivid in real life as the others; it was mostly the look of the underlying clouds with the reddish hue showing through that caught my eye.

I forgot to mention the focal lengths... most were shot between 50 and 60mm, so you can get idea of how close / huge these clouds were. Hopefully I'll have a few more opportunities like this as the summer passes, but no more Tornado horns.

:)

Hey Puckjunkey,

These look very nice... I think my favorite is the middle one with the reddish in it.
I'm afraid I can't give any suggestions for improvement, as these are very well done. I see what you mean by not adding any tree tops as a reference point. You've done a good job with these.

Thanks for the kind words, rainfall. To be honest I've tried in the past to capture impressive cloud formations both ways (with a horizon - or mountains in some case - and without). But I was never really happy with the shots that had both cloud and landscape, because it was hard to find a balancing point whereby neither detracted from the other. It was difficult to make a "whole" IOW... so this time I went strictly without horizon.

I will say it was fun just shooting them because it really allowed me to use a bunch of odd angles / really get into it without worrying about tilted horizons and the like.