A single rain cloud slips past the sun and seems to spawn a family of similarly shaped but much smaller clouds over Egypt’s Suez Canal. The reflection of the sun on the canal offers a counter-balance to the huge cloud. Meanwhile, a towering memorial reaches toward those clouds in the center of the image. It honors the 30,000 Indian, British, and Australian troops who stopped the Turkish army from seizing the canal early in 1915. The focus of the attack was a key railroad junction here at Ismailia.

The lonely house stands as a sentinel on an Andean ridge high above the village of Paccha, a small town about an hour outside of Cuenca. The tiny building not only seems isolated and vulnerable by its position on the edge of the mountain ridge -- it is also dwarfed by the scale incongruity of the threatening storm clouds looming overhead.

There is always something to photograph on a cruise, even when the ship may be far out at sea. I enjoy finding cloud formations at sea that seem to tell a story on their own. Using a 24mm wideangle focal length, I was able to frame a series of clouds that seem to hang above the distant horizon, strung out over a velvety ocean along a deep blue sky. The image speaks of infinity – the scene appears to go on forever.

Clouds over water are often loaded with moisture, and when they become translucent via backlight, they often reveal striking textures and forms within. In this case, storm clouds off California’s Mission Beach cause rain showers to fall out to sea, and the patterns of those showers, when related to the early evening sun, become striking “God’s Rays.” No matter how evocative the pattern created by light, moisture, and clouds may be, it takes a flying gull to add a focal point here, a place for the eye to go. It seems to flee before the storm.

When photographing clouds, I have the option of shooting them for their own beauty, or else placing them into context with other subject matter. I choose the latter course here, placing a diagonal cloud between a row of repeating diagonal flagpoles and the silhouetted buildings straddling New York’s Fifth Avenue. The dusk sky is powder blue, while the cloud shows tinges of pink, still reflecting the departed sun.

Is it a cloud or is it fog? This image asks such a question. Both are made of condensed water – clouds generally soar high above the earth while fog hovers close to it. In this case the line is blurred, because Moab’s iconic Fisher Towers rest upon the ground but rise into the sky, and I find the moment when they emerge from the billowing clouds of fog that have gathered around the snow covered butte. The billowing mist abstracts the scene, rendering the Towers as stylized skyscrapers – a city of ghosts. The scene is quite different from the one I photographed from the same spot at sunset, three years earlier. ( http://www.pbase.com/image/69219410 ) In that image, Fisher Towers is wreathed in shadow and bathed in gold. In this one, it emerges from the mist as a primitive cityscape. Each plays with the imagination, but in strikingly different ways.