Cloudy with a chance of meatballs

Yes, yes I know, I've been MIA for days. Well, that thing called "life" happened and brought with it a double punch of health issues and various other family responsibilities to boot. I have been extremely tired and really just not feeling my best...or myself...or my best self either.

I did however get a few opportunities to edit some photos which was nice. Apart from that, productivity has been exceptionally low.

To be honest, there's no real theme to these photos other than the clouds which rolled in with a storm a while back. They seemed endless and came in all shapes and sizes prior to wanting to flood the fucking place to smithereens. Ah, yes, this reminds me why winter is far from my favourite season.

They do make for an interesting backdrop compared to plain blue skies. My camera isn't state of the art and cloudy day photos are definitely not of the same quality when it comes to lighting. Every photo that I took was exceptionally dark and had to be tweaked. I know what people are thinking "Why don't you adjust the exposure on the camera?" Well because then I know that I'll forget it on +3 or something and over expose a whole lot of images until I realise...I'd rather deal with underexposed photos, at least the details are still there. Over exposure? There's not a huge amount you can do other then delete them and try again.

Am I speaking from experience? Yes, I've done this before and lost some great action shots of flying birds so I learned the lesson the hard way.

I have no idea why I like pylons. It's like photographing big bridges and railway lines. They convey an immense amount of power (literally and figuratively), the way we can transmit things through the most barren of lands to get to wherever it needs to be is pretty neat and vastly overlooked a lot of the time. Plus they look nice when they are intermingled with countryside or farm life in the surrounding areas. The way the lines intersect at such straight angles with the fluffy clouds behind them, it makes for nice contrast of form. Those clouds had their own kind of electricity in them though...it was still busy building up, I could smell the static in the air.

While out there I also got a few nice shots of this helicopter. It's a small one and it wasn't far away. A good thing as my lens isn't great for super long zooms. Another weird optical thingy going on here with the rotor blades at absolutely the wrong angle of rotation made them look like they shouldn't be able to get any lift for this aircraft at all, even though they are actually really long. It looks like an insect with really pathetic feelers. I kind of like it, just because it's different. The way the clouds are hugging the horizon in this photo and there is such stark contrast between the clouds and the black of the helicopter. I got a few with it's feelers fully visible as well of course.

And there were cows - the cows always seem to make an appearance. I have a feeling this would look nice in mono. I still haven't really figured out what kind of colour photo makes a good black and white one. There's always something to learn and perhaps this is something I need to spend some time on.

Why are the cows almost always facing left?