I photograph clouds from time to time. Not thinking of spaceships or anything of the sort, only the clouds. Just stopping somewhere for a moment to look at the sky can be mesmerizing. Especially if standing on the shore by the sea with the horizon in sight. With clouds every second is unique. If you look away for a moment a beautiful cloud is gone or maybe something interesting comes up where there was nothing.
I don’t go cloudwatching all the time, just sometimes. I try to have no goals or pressure, merely moments of calm. This happens mostly in the summer because our winter is too cold for those beautiful big Cumulonimbus clouds.
Simple clouds. The bonus in how you often find birds flying in high altitudes. Swallows usually. You don’t necessarily even see them when photographing, zooming in reveals them.Cirrus clouds can be quite pretty too.Closeups of a rising Cumulonimbus cap forming. Sometimes it is not so easy to check the tiny dots among the clouds off as birds. Birds make a darker than cloud silhouettes, when it’s white it is likely something else. Sometimes I see these tiny white dots. Definitely not birds. They were an intriguing mystery until last year when it turned out there is a weather balloon station north of where I live. The white dots are just their research balloons. Not that I ever thought they were anything out of this world.
Yup, clouds are nice.
Due to the huge size of a cloud a small spaceship can’t really touch it. There is no contact surface because a cloud is not very sharp on the edges looking at it next to a spaceship just a few metres long. Therefore my rules of interaction don’t apply. I have rules, you see. One of them is that the model must have some kind of interaction with its surroundings, a shadow or a reflection from a light source for example. Anything to tie them together. With clouds this rule does not work. Unless it’s a really big spaceship maybe, a Star Destroyer or something like that. To make this thing work with my small ships I have to simply work with light, contrast and colour.
Watch the Skies, 2020. Clouds from the window of an aeroplane a few years earlier. I wish I had more of these but when I still used to fly I never had a good camera for taking images like this with me. This was taken with my old Canon PowerShot G16 point-and-shooter. It was a fairly good camera when the circumstances were right. In low light the image quality dropped fast. But if the grain can be part of the look, then why not make the best of it.Over the Clouds, 2018. Enough light for the old Canon PowerShot to capture at least some detail from the calm clouds illuminated by the rising sun. This was somewhere over Greenland I think. I was flying home from Seattle in 2015 and had a window seat.A triptych of vertical cloud images from 2020-2022. Various experiments with clouds from the archives. These were probably all photographed simply from our back yard.Heavens Above, 2020. That X-wing model has no engine lights as it is fixed with the landing gear down. I edited the landing gear out for this but didn’t want to fake the engine lights. There is a nice calm gliding feel to it without them. Smooth, you can almost hear the engine almost at idle speed.The fixed landing gear of the big X-wing doesn’t prevent all cloud works. The big 1:24 scale model in front and the old 1:43-ish scale MPC X-wing duplicated in the background. The oldie is painted in the Rogue One partisan scheme and engines are with real lights in them. No engine light forgery there.
The header photograph is just a cloud, a nice cloud, no birds. I figured it’d work on its own there.
