Clouds just before the weather changing storm that rolled through today. It has been so hot here in Northwest Arkansas the last couple of weeks. This evening it is breezy and cool. Not at all humid. Simply lovely weather to be outside. These clouds are always welcome at my home.
Bales of hay are so fun. They remind me of when I was a little girl. I lived on a farm until I was 7. Mainly cows and chickens... and a couple very large garden spots. My uncle would store the big round bales in the unused half of the chicken house. My sister and I would sneak in and climb all over the bales. I am sure that there were snakes and all sorts of critters living in them, but as children we never thought about any of that. We just knew that it was fun to use them like slides until they were falling apart.
We had a lightning storm the other night. Before the rain started I was able to get this shot of the lightning. Shooting lightning is so unpredictable. There was so much of it flashing all over but almost never where my camera was pointing.
The thing that I love about this picture is that you see different things when you look at it in different ways. If you look at the cloud in front... the dark one... it looks like an active volcano with smokey ash blowing out the top. If you look more in the background the cloud looks like a distant shore and the brighter part is a reflective lake. In reality, this is the sun setting. The actual sun is behind the really dark cloud in the front. I love clouds. They are mother nature's ink blot tests.
Sunset. I realize that it may be slightly underexposed, but I think that it works for this one. I could only get the pretty sun color fade by underexposing it. If I had made the shutter stay open any longer I would have gotten a fuzzy photo. There was nothing to prop the camera on as a temporary tripod and getting mine unhooked from my bag and set up would have taken too long. The sun was setting very quickly. I was taking pictures just as quickly as I could change the settings trying to expose it correctly and only 2 or 3 photos after this one the sun was already halfway behind the tree. Still I like it. I really need to stop posting after midnight.
