The Four Ages Of Sand

Rain falling over the A10

Black and White clouds over Enfield College

Moon on a cloud

Here's the Moon on Friday, just as the storm clouds were clearing

Speaking of sunsets...

Speaking of sunsets, here's a beauty spotted by Alan:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/earth/3391311/2009-Australian-Weather-Calendar.html

Wild Weather

Here's a storm building over Enfield College on Friday afternoon. No Photoshop here; this straight out of the camera.

Like a painting isn't it?

If the skyline had been a bit more artistic this could have been a winner, good enough to impress even Tubby Thommo:

And then it cleared in a couple of minutes. Again no image manipulation of any kind, apart from stitching the photos together.

Still struggling to get that bit right, as you can see...

And the sun came out and later there was a glorious sunset, but by that time, I was in a traffic jam and couldn't get my lens out of the window

Bizarre cloudy coincidence

I noticed this weird cloud on Thursday evening at sunset. It was a very distant cloud, and the photo is taken with a telephoto lens. I could see a mouse sitting up and looking to the upper right.

The next day I got this email from Alan:

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Soon after I got on the motorway last night, I spotted a distinctive cloud. 20 miles later, I still hadn't reached it. It struck me that, given suitable circumstances, you and I could perhaps locate the same cloud, each from our own house (or other appropriate location). We should try that one weekend when there are tall stormy clouds about. Do you have a compass?

It'd be a good pair of photos for your blog.

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My reply:

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"Fantastic idea. Yes I've got a compass. I may be wrong but I think we can measure the circumference of the Earth by comparing how high the cloud is at a particular time.

I've posted a weird cloud on the blog for sunday, which I took last night. It wasn't a v dark cloud low on the horizon at sunset was it?"

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His reply:

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I wonder if it's the same one, what a coincidence that would be. It was a tall cloud with what I think they call an anvil head. I was travelling east, and it was more or less in front of me most of the way. When I turned off at J6 for Windsor, it was about north east of me, so in your general direction. This'd be about 6:30 to 7:00. Could have been another five miles on in your direction. So, from your perspective, it'd have been south-westish, maybe 30-35 miles away. Given that I could see it clearly from at least 25 miles away ... Can you send me the photo early?

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He also sent me a sketch of the cloud. Did I mention he went to Art College?

He checked on a map and decided that his cloud was in the direction of Uxbridge. it was easy for me to plot the direction of mine because it in a straight line from J24 on the M25. The pen shows the line of sight:

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And it leads directly to...

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Uxbridge!

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How bizarre that Alan should suggest looking for the same cloud across a fair-sized chunk of London, and it turns out that we'd already done it by accident the previous evening! 

Sunset over South Mimms

Here's another time lapse. This is around 200 images taken at sunset last night.

It's a bit "wobbly" because I really need a more stable tripod for this sort of thing. Also in the middle of taking the photos a (big) man and a (big) woman came over to me because they thought I might be taking photos of their horses with a view to stealing them to order, which is apparently very common.

They were actually quite nice once they saw what I was doing, but it was difficult to keep my end of the conversation up whilst trying to take a picture every 8 seconds.

Again, it's much better in High Quality (click under the clip)

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=8E_6tN6K96Y

Time lapse with Nikon D60: clouds over Enfield College

Here's my first proper time lapse taken with my Nikon D60.

266 images taken manually every 10 seconds, (it was a slow day at work..) and compressed to 15 frames a second, so this is speeded up 150 times, which gives an 18 second clip (repeated twice) from a 40 minute sequence.

If you click on High Quality first, this one looks quite good in Full Screen. Just click on the icon under the clip. Actually, I expect you all know this stuff anyway. Uni M showed me how to view in Full Screen yesterday: I was so impressed!

The music is Vivaldi again:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=GCpJDFmvKdI

Fluffy pink cloud

No hidden images here (unless Alan can find any...) just a great cloud pic from Stuart:

Head in the clouds: Why was I born so ugly?

  The face of the Elephant Man?