Y'all seemed to enjoy the cloud post I threw up last week, so I thought we'd do another. I'm giving Liketu another try, so you've already seen all the photos before reading this. That in mind, let me tell you about them.

I hadn't left the house with the intention of taking cloud photos, but I did leave with my camera when I went on a walk, as I often do. I know in these days of smartphones we always have our camera with us, eliminating the need to take a full camera just-in-case. But I sometimes do anyway. There is a difference to looking at a smartphone screen and looking in the viewfinder of a dslr (and another difference in looking through the viewfinder of a rangefinder, like the amazing Leica). Neither is necessarily better or worse than the other, they just trigger different creative muscles; sometimes having that slightly different way of seeing something is all you need.

Anyway, I was walking over the train crossing. Training crossings (and street crossings for that matter) often have pedestrian overpasses in Japan, at least in midsize cities and above. This particular pedestrian overpass happened to be right next to a big highway that also passes over the train crossing.

I was crossing over and happened to look up above the highway and the clouds just jumped out at me. Beautiful white puffy clouds. So I got as far over as I could to let other walkers pass me (it was a very narrow path) and took photos for awhile. Above are some of the best ones.

Unfortunately the highway in the foreground kind of prevents any of these from being great photos, but I think the clouds make up for that at least a little.

I did one monochrome edit for my buddy @daveks. I absolutely prefer monochrome, but I don't always take the time to edit that way. Editing a good monochrome photo is (to me) more time consuming than editing a color photo. Maybe because without the color to distract, you have to work the photo much more to make it compelling. So I only did one.

I mentioned Leica above. My dream camera is their monochrome camera. I think the current latest monochrome model is the M11 Monochrom. It's way outside my price range (at $9k) so I can only lust after it. Someday... someday. Anyway, without the color filter, the resulting image is simply magical.

At any rate, hope you enjoyed the clouds with me!

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku.

For the best experience view this post on Liketu