SKIES

You can never have too many photographs of skies. Of course, shots of very normal skies have their uses, but here I have tended to favour the more spectacular. Many were taken from Newcastle Town Moor. After deciding to do a page of skies, I realised that I had rather a lot of them, so this selection has been culled ruthlessly from shots I have taken in just the last couple of months (this written October 2006).

I have a few shots like this, where the cloud near the horizon, lit from below, looks like the atmosphere of Jupiter, with angry swirling bands of blood red.

A dramatic sky, that puts me in mind of a scene from a Thomas Hardy novel, perhaps as depicted by a Victorian painter.

Grey, but still interesting.

Sublime colours in this one - purple in the clouds below, with faint green and pink in those above.

It seemed necessary to include at least one with a sun-spray. This one is of Rosy-Toed Dusk over Newcastle Moor.

This is a strange one, taken in the park in front of Alexander Palace in north-east London. To my eye, it looks as though the area is under artillery attack, with great plumes of smoke marking shell falls and burning buildings.

A nice simple soft one, with a couple of heifers caught grazing on the hill.

I don't know what caused this effect. There were no electrical storms, and the sun was on the other side of the sky. For some reason there is a bright green streak in the sky.

When flying into clouds in an aircraft, it seems that the edges of clouds are very gradual and diffused, and yet from a distance the edges usually seem so distinct. These seem like clouds you could bash your head on.

I like the way a thick back-lit cloud looks black. It lends a lot of contrast to the sky. The sun is behind that big one, which is low and near the camera. To the naked eye, the ground was clearly visible as grassy green, but I exposed for the sky alone.

I have many shots of huge wide skies, but often I find there is a good shot to be had using a longer lens. The warm part of the horizon is not large, and here the narrower composition turns that middle cloud into a bar right across the frame.

For obvious reasons, I took a fair few of this sky. I have a nice close-up of the three heifers on the right and the red mass above them.

Contrasting cloud types - low dirty clouds, one looking mush-room-like, and high white ones.

There seems to be another world up there. Here I can see the hand of a storm god reaching out of that top-right cloud.

A wispy sunset to end on.