It doesn’t happen every year, but now and then we get a really dry-air day in the Seattle area. At the same time, the air over the Cascade mountain range can still have enough moisture to make clouds.
Add in a little wild wind action to stir the clouds, and you get the strange dreamscape in this post. :)
I see a menagerie of giant creatures swimming past Mt. Rainier. This was taken over a field in Enumclaw, WA, on the way to get my teeth cleaned. Long drive, but so worth it after this.
Technical info: I had thought I might catch a good view of Mt. Rainier on the drive, so I left early. I took my longer lenses with me just in case , including 150mm and 240mm, with the 2x extender (for 300mm and 480mm). I started out under the clouds in the image, and felt fortunate to wind up away from them so I could photograph them from the side like this.
I took 23 images for the panorama, each about 100 megapixels. Only 16 were useable—the clouds were moving fast enough that by the time I got to the third row, they had moved too far to be usable. After a little trimming and overlapping, this was about a 1.5 gigapixel panorama.
Because the clouds had shifted at least a little bit, I had do do most of the sky manually. The bottom row of images worked out well automatically in Affinity Photo.
The level of detail is huge. If printed at high resolution (250ppi, pixels per inch), this would be 17’ by 4’. The image uploaded here is just 10% of full size, so it’s just a hint of what’s in the full image.