Part of being a photographer is being something of a hunter, a detective, and a scientist all wrapped-up into one. Cloud-Y is a good illustration of these roles at work. As a photographer, I’ve always looked to the sky for interesting colour, shapes, and movement. I don’t remember taking this picture (actually a rare thing), but I had to have been attracted to the “Y” shaped cloud formation. I’m sure I got the slide back from the lab, classified the photo as “cool” but not worth enlarging, and left it in the files.

Recently I’ve been playing the hunter and detective. I’ve been going through my collection of slides and negatives looking for forgotten gems that I can share with the world. I opened Cloud-Y in Adobe Lightroom last week to see if anything could be done with it. The first thing I noticed was that the original slide was underexposed. My detective and scientist skills started to kick-in as I worked the settings to draw more out of the photograph. As it happened, there was a whole layer of light and colour that I hadn’t seen in the underexposed slide. Moving the sliders revealed the shape and colour of the light that had been hiding behind the cloud formation. What had previously been a blue sky picture with some interesting clouds had become a burst of beautiful colour. I love a successful hunt!

Nikon FE2 w. Nikkor 105 f/2.5 (Most likely!)