Cascade Sunset Clouds

The weather here over the past few days has been dramatically Spring-ish. Unlike our traditional multi-layer blankets of grey, we’ve been treated to dramatic broken clouds and sunbreaks. This evening as we were finishing dinner (Nick made pasta and meatballs!) the dining room’s eastern facing windows began bathing us in golden light. A large storm cloud was over the Cascades and was being lit by the setting sun. Nick said I should get my camera. I stood up and looked outside, and noted the towering, spreading cloud top and said that I really don’t have a wide-angle lens wide enough to really and adequately capture the moment. Then I recalled that I had a step-up ring that fit my Olympus 0.7x teleconverter. I dug that out of the camera bag as fast as I could and screwed together the bits I needed, and scurried out onto the deck. Sure enough the 9.8mm equiv lens couldn’t capture the entirety of the scene. (You guys need to buy some of my photos so I can buy that 7-14mm lens! Click over there!—> )

I shot about 50 images, most in JPEG then finally remembered to switch to RAW as the sun finally sunk over the horizon.

Today, after chatting with a few folks about the fixes in the latest rev of Aperture I re-downloaded/installed it (after nuking all evidence of its previous existence off my disk.) Oddly the pixels right off the sensor were pretty damn good on their own! I performed minimal adjustments. These three images are straight JPEG exports from Aperture. No round trips to Photoshop for my usual “save to web” treatment. Which do you like best?