Coneflower Mammatus

 

One summer afternoon, sitting at my desk, and my son comes running in the house, he goes, “Dad, dad, you got to see these clouds.” So I wandered outside. I think I took three steps out the front porch and went right back in to get the camera. In the sky were Mammatus clouds, clouds that when you see them, you really don't want to see them if they're overhead. Fortunately, these were to the south a bit, headed in the right direction away from us. They usually are indicators of possible tornadic activity, and that ain't good. I had noticed that the sky was getting darker before my son came running in.

 

This was a ways back. My son's now 32 and he was 12 at the time. So this is a relatively old image, shot on Fuji Velvia film. I stood on our front sidewalk looking at these clouds and going, you know, I took a couple shots of just the clouds. I'm going, well, that's boring. What can I put in the foreground to make these a little bit more interesting? My neighbor has some trees. I put those in the foreground and soon realize that they would just be dark black shapes. They'd be silhouetted because the sky compared to the surrounding landscape was much brighter. So the trees just fell into silhouette. So I'm looking around, I've got these purple coneflowers growing on the sidewalk in a garden border. And I said, oh, they're pink. They'll make a great contrast with those dark clouds. I got out my widest lens and I was actually laying on the ground, my head between the camera, and the sidewalk, literally my face is on the sidewalk, and looking at this wide angle lens, you get these flowers and thing, and then realized again, oh, they're silhouetted as well.

 

So in my entire file, 100s of thousands of images, I may have a dozen or so that are actually made with a strobe. I don't like strobe lighting. I use that in a studio in a commercial career for years. Not my cup of tea. I don't like the light. It's very harsh. But I went and got the strobe light so I could open up the pink colors of these flowers. And put it on a chord that I could move around so I could get it from different directions and make it different strengths. And that's how this picture was made.

 

Getting the film back a week later, I looked at the images and was pretty pleased with them and a friend of mine was doing some of my printing at the time. So, Fred printed these for me, and I got the images back, and the gray sky was purple blue. I'm going, “Fred, What do you do to my gray clouds?” He said, “Yeah, isn't it cool?” And he says, “Well, look at them for a week or so, and if you want, I'll reprint them.” I looked at them and I actually kind of like the coloring that he gave it, and that's now how I portray it.

 

So that's Coneflower Mammatus. Really nasty clouds and beautiful cone flowers in one image.