Lens Artists Challenge #353: Stormy

Lens Artists Challenge #353: Stormy

After several months of really, really miserable weather, this week, the skies cleared, the Sun came out, and it's been absolutely fabulous. Which is a shame really, because Beth from Wandering Dawgs is hosting the Challenge for the first time (welcome, Beth), and her theme is ... Stormy. (https://wanderingdawgs.com/2025/06/14/lens-artists-photo-challenge-353-stormy/

). 'This week I’m challenging you to show us your stormy images,' says Beth. 'Think about stormy weather, stormy feelings, or maybe stormy situations.'

Truth be told, stormy feelings and situations don't occur to me very often, so that leaves me with the weather. We do get some lovely stormy clouds around here, and although thunder and lightning was forecast last week, it never materialised. When we arrived in the Maldives last year, I expected lovely golden tropical sunsets, but instead we were greeted with the tail end of a series of tropical storms. The featured image is a slight intentional camera movement image of the sunset after one such storm.

Around here, stormy clouds can be quite monochrome in nature, but I do like to bring a little colour to my stormy scenes through the creation of trichromes. The trichrome technique has been around almost since the dawn of photography, and uses red, green, and blue coloured filters to produce three near-identical black and white images. When these images are combined in a photo editor like PhotoShop or GuIMP, the result is a colour image. I won't go into the nitty gritty of making a trichrome, I posted my method here (http://www.keithdevereux.com/2023/05/the-joy-of-trichromes-with-nintendo.html?m=1) for anyone who is interested. It's for the Gameboy but the principle is the same for film or digital.

Any movement between the frames means the images won't completely line up, which results in multicoloured artefacts on the final image. What I like to do is deliberately encourage these artefacts in the movement of clouds. I'll take the first image, with the red filter, then wait 30s or so and take the second image with the green filter, then 30s later take the final image with the blue filter. When the three images are combined, the results are rainbow coloured clouds as they move across the sky. It's even more fun if you do it in infrared. 

The last image on this post is quite a recent one for me. You might have noticed that I've tumbled way down the Rapid film format rabbit hole, and this image is a redscaled image of an electricity poles after the last series of storms to hit Portugal, before the weather cleared up. It was taken on the Bilora Radix, actually an Agfa Karat film camera from the early 1950s, the precursor of the Rapid film system of the 60s.

Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here (https://photobyjohnbo.com/about-lens-artists/), and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag 'Lens-Artists'.

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#Stormy, #LensArtists, Lens-Artists, #Challenge, #Clouds, #Trichrome, #Infrared, #Experimental,