Cloud Shadows, Walking Over the Ground
The only part of weather that lands, and it never stays put.
On open country the clouds matter less than what they throw down. A shadow crosses a slope at the speed of the wind, takes the colour out of a field for a minute, then hands it back. Photographs of this are always slightly wrong, because they stop the one thing that was moving.
The shadows end up doing the work of depth. Lit ground and dark ground alternate into bands, and the eye reads those bands as distance even where the land is flat. The colours split as well: shaded patches drift blue, sunlit ones stay warm, so a single frame carries two temperatures without looking edited.
On a screen the dark patches turn out to be the useful part. Icons sit in them without a fight, and the picture stays half-lit rather than bright, which is easier to keep behind a day of work. It looks like a place where the weather has not finished deciding.
