What does the sky look like?

There’s a rainbow in the sky! Out came the iPhones and it was not just mine. 

There is always something very compelling about the sky that makes me fill up the majority of the shot with it. The sky is the sky and yet it is so changeable. At times mild, at times dangerous. The sky is all wild nature, albeit sometimes tainted by man-made smog.

The strange thing about nature phoneography, at least for me, is how I am so tempted to make nature to be so much more than what it really is in real life.

The rainbow doesn’t look obvious enough. Let’s use the vibrant filter in camera+, let’s up the contrast in Snapseed, etc etc. And yet, I wanted the clouds to retain their soft colours and fluffy nature. So yes, I did continue to edit using Photoshop so that the editing was more specific to certain areas of the image only when it came to the clouds.

Quite some time back, I was awestruck by how the cross-winds sent the raindrops aflutter at more than twenty storeys high.  Usually one sees the rain streak down in obvious pinstripes according to the direction of the prevailing wind. But that day, the rain drops flew like confetti in the air in all sorts of directions. Their frenzied activity caught in the light and I was mesmerised. What happen in nature in motion does not translate very well when one is using one’s phone to point and shoot.

That light-hearted flutter of tiny drops  in the light gets lost. And so I try to achieve a sharper image with the clarity filter in Camera+, up the contrast, applied a gentle emo filter so that the tiny droplets show up against the darkened colours. It is of course a futile exercise.

What one ends up with… kind of like a stylised, sharp image of a moody scene peppered by dandruff for rain. I like it though. It looks like a town where Batman may visit :P

And then I wonder, what if I had taken my camera camera, not my handphone camera, and set it to achieve a longer exposure. Would that have captured the flying rain? Do I even know what I am talking about? :P

But still at least one image within this entry I would like, to be simple, basic, unedited and still interesting. And so, this is the one I have for you. The anvil-shaped cumulo nimbus in its gentle luminescent glory.

Which appeals to you more? Nature untouched or Nature made hyper-real?

Phoneography Monday: Nature
App used: Gorillacam, Camera+, Snapseed