Baildon Moor Cloudscape II

I haven't escaped the confines of the garden today, so I bring a familiar view, letting only the variety in the cloudscape offer something fresh.

The sky is a frequent subject of mine, but this shot is close enough in style and location to Baildon Moor Cloudscape to begin to think of this as a series.

For some reason I prefer portrait over landscape for this kind of picture, perhaps because, with the clouds as the subject, the frame reaches up and into the sky.

Although I'm a professional geographer, I've never studied much meterology. Geographers go more for climatology, although I didn't do too much of that either. I've been using Richard Hamblyn's Cloud Book to learn though, and I'm fairly confident that the low-lying clouds in the picture are cumulus humilis (Cu hum) or fair weather clouds. As a comparison, here's a similar shot from later in the afternoon where they've developed to cumulus congestus (Cu con). I'm happy to be corrected by more experienced cloud spotters than I though.

We did enjoy a nice rainbow first thing this morning, but I didn't quite manage a sharp enough image for it to be blipworthy.

fair weather clouds ~ ranging ~ across the moors ~ cotton wool herd ~ of elephants