Serendipity. I speak often about the value of patience, waiting for Mother Nature to give you what you seek. But another side of this wonderful photography journey is the opposite: simply taking what Mother Nature presents to you unexpectedly. I was out this evening for a walk. This was not really an intentional photo shoot; I carried a camera, of course, but the purpose of the outing was the walk itself. I was trying out, and breaking in, some new hiking gear. I walked a couple miles on a local trail, and shot a few uninspired shots in the woods, but didn't really get anything worthwhile, and hadn't intended to. But then, after I returned to the car and started driving home, serendipity whacked me right between the eyes. Driving west, I saw such wonderful cloud formations, with shafts and rays and beams of sunlight popping through. When lady Sarah hands you dipity, you don't look a gift cloud in the mouth. I stopped, right there on the back-country road, and got some shots. Then I moved on, and when I turned north onto the highway, well, serendipity just got more insistent. I had to pull into a couple farm driveways, hop out, and walk around a bit (to get out from under power lines, and look for good perspectives for composition). I knew the light was fickle, variable, and fleeting, so I had to work quickly. But before the rays and beams came to an end, I was beaming, with gratitude, for having been passing through, at that place and time. When you are handed a bit of good fortune, don't hesitate to grasp it and ride it as long as you can. And so, my dear friends, as Todd Snider says: "May some good fortune come to you."
The composition took just a little zooming (both with my feet, and with the zoom lens), and careful framing. The tricky part of these shots is finding a way to keep those bright white spots in the clouds from either being overexposed, thus losing any detail in the cloud, or from overpowering your camera's automatic metering system and forcing it to darken the whole shot so much that detail is lost in the foreground landscape. Working quickly doesn't make it easier, and here I just metered off the blue part of the sky above me, using it as an in-between light value, neither as bright as the brightest clouds, nor as dark as the foreground field, and then locked exposure there. Having set the aperture at f/11, I then just cranked the shutter speed up high, until my viewfinder exposure meter balanced, and took the shot. (I also took a few other shots with slight variations in exposure compensation, to hedge my bet. But this one, with no compensation set, turned out pretty well. The RAW file was kind of dark in the foreground, but not so bad that it couldn't be brought up in post-processing. Along with a touch of contrast and vibrancy, and a tiny touch of dodging and burning (thank you, Ansel Adams!), I was able to get an image I am happy with.