The sky was colorful when I look outside about 4:15pm. Yellow was threaded through the clouds, with a few bright spots here and there, and a bright yellow and turquoise rim near the horizon.
So I grabbed my camera, got the memory stick loaded, found an almost-right lens (50mm rather than wide angle), and by the time I got to the porch we had reached orange and purple. A fair trade for my tardiness.
Shot with the Sony a7R IV with the 50mm f/1.2 lens, set at f/2.8. I didn’t really have a clear view (it’s winter; the sun never gets very high, and sets well to the south of west), but I did see faint signs of color and brightness within the clouds. I waited, waited some more, and then the clouds sort of thinned and a little color gets through—snap!
Oops: automatic focus didn’t focus on the clouds, even though I asked it to. Ugh! I switched to manual focus, and zoomed in as far as I could to try to nail focus. I could see why the autofocus was having trouble: these clouds were intricate but not at the small scale that a focusing algorithm likes to see. Three out of a dozen images met the grade for focus, this was my favorite. Exposure: ISO 100, 1/640th of a second, f/2.8.