nothing but clouds

It was a lousy day for this sort of thing. The worst sky ever for photography. Just gray. All day. The wide angle was snapped on and the thing left to run with no expectation except the expectation of tossing out the result.

Every time you look up at the sky you see nothing but gray just sitting there and what appears to be dead nothing when you're living in it, then when run speeded up turns out to be an impressively dynamic massive exchange of water through the sky from Montana and Wyoming right through Colorado to New Mexico.

How's that, eh? 

This bit is technical. 

To show this the few hundred pictures had to be shrunken from billboard to postage stamp size, the change in shades of gray, the only sky color, cannot be handled this way so the gradients are divided into bars that look like isobars and nothing like clouds. To correct the bars that occur by saving in gif form, or mess up the bars, noise is sprinkled in made of random dots to blur the dividing bars.

It's crazy. That extreme optimization did get the file size down from 17M to 7M. 

You notice when these run that it's choppy at first. That's your computer collecting all the frames. Once your computer has them all then they can run smoothly the second time on. 

I love this. It made me realize the day is a lot more dynamic gorgeous and powerful than I am giving it credit.