Capturing Clouds
If you ask most people what their idea of a perfect day is, they would invariably cite the fact that there ‘wasn’t a cloud in the sky’. Clear blue skies tend to cheer folks up, well apart from most photographers I know. A cloudless sky is one stripped of an important element, drama. That drama is often supplied by clouds. Whether they are the soft fluffy type, the dark moody type or the mackerel skies. Cloud inversions are even more sought after. That feeling you are floating above the clouds and distant landscapes peek through the clouds or are enveloped by them. Calderdale is a particularly good spot for cloud inversions as the valleys are very steep sided and cloud has a tendency to get trapped in them.
My photography tends to lean on the dark and moody side. I love dramatic atmospheres - mist, cloud, storm, the more oppressive or cloudy, the better. Maybe it's because I haven’t come to grips with shooting in very sunny conditions, or I just don’t use ND filters enough/properly. Maybe it is because it is a reflection of my general mood. I have a dark brooding personality that is best expressed through my photography. From the moment I started to take photography more seriously, I favoured dark, de-saturated images. I thought and indeed still do think, a light blue/grey tone to my photography works better for me. Clouds and cloud inversions really lend themselves to this colour palette.
We do good skies in Yorkshire. We have big landscapes with height and valleys. This can be a problem to capture the grandeur of the landscape but I still try. There sometimes isn’t a foreground, just plenty of middle and background. It is how you present this type of view. I have used 2:1 or 16:9 crops lately to express a sense of scale to my photos. I find it a good way of showing off just how open and uninterrupted the scenery is.
There is a local campaign to stop a proposed windfarm of 65, 200m high wind turbines on the moors between upper Calderdale and the moors above Top Withens near Haworth. This would have a devastating effect on the upland moorland ecosystem as well as drastically affecting the landscape of this area. To say it is overkill is an understatement! We are used to wind turbines in Calderdale but on a smaller scale. Clumps of up to ten moderately sized turbines, can just about sit comfortably with the surroundings but this proposal is huge both in the size of the turbines and the number they wish to put in place. The big skies would be peppered with massive structures, looming like giants over the peat bogs and rocky outcrops. It would be dramatic but rather more in the way Tolkien painted nightmarish visions of the landscape once Isengard fell to Saruman.
I didn't intend this to be a campaigning blog post about the wind farm proposal, it is about why I love clouds.Maybe it is their ethereal qualities, their mystical properties, of how they change the landscape for the better. I am writing this on damp grey Sunday morning. It doesn’t feel very inspirational weather today. The sky is light grey with little or no cloud definition at all. I do try in every light or weather to get photos. I do work for my craft but I just don’t crave clear blue skies any more. Good luck to you if you do and I hope they lift your spirits. Mine aren’t deflated by blue skies but just throw in a few clouds to make them more interesting.
