Figure 1 – A break in the clouds in the style of Maxfield Parrish. IPhone photograph. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

I was driving home from work on Tuesday and stopped at the local farm-stand. When I returned to my car I heard the distant peel of thunder and looked up into a dense atmospheric cloud cover. I headed down the road towards home traversing the marshlands of the Assabet River. As the horizon came into view I was greeted by the scene of Figure 1. This is the reason one should always carry a camera. In the case of this picture, it was my IPhone.

The IPhone actually works better for me than my Canon when it comes to photographing clouds because of the marvelous wide angle field of view. With my Canon I seldom have a wide angle enough lens with me. I took this picture twice: one straight and the other with HDR on. As it turned out the dynamic range did not require the HDR setting. On the other hand IPhone pictures always suffer in that they are only eight bit. You can see the discreteness as your set the histogram.

As for the image itself, it is a break in the clouds. I think of it as a notch which seems to separate the Earth from the heavens, in such a way that the different planes are ambiguous. The ambiguity is part of the appeal of the light. But beyond that, these are clouds in the style of the artist Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966). I have always admired in this painting the power of the blues and how he captured the luminance of the light.