We had no appointments Friday morning and it was partly cloudy, so my husband and I decided to go north on the Blue Ridge Parkway in search of adventure and photographic fortune. Our friend Matt had introduced us to a lone tree up that way. Lone trees can increase the interest in the foreground in dramatic cloud photographs. I don’t like clear blue skies and I am always looking for exciting cloud formations with foreground interest. I had my Infrared camera with me because I like the way Infrared converted cameras capture the detail in clouds.
We were not disappointed and spent at least a half an hour shooting the tree framed by the clouds from different angles. We were watching the changes to the cloud in the middle of the photo near the mountains. The clouds were so beautiful that we decided to go further north up the Parkway to search for further vistas. After 15 minutes of driving we decided that the same cloud was ‘following’ us and becoming more specific in its form. There were other interesting clouds around. We parked at an overlook and kept turning in long slow circles photographing various clouds over the mountains and trees. The clouds kept morphing as we turned. Our cloud had formed into a lenticular cloud and one of the more spectacular clouds that I have seen up there. It really looked like a 3 tiered UFO.
Hunger and appointments drew us back down the parkway towards home. When we got down to the lone tree, there was the same 3 tiered UFO cloud hanging right over it. Over the protest of our stomachs, we stopped and spent another 15 minutes photographing the tree and cloud.
