CLOUDS I HAVE KNOWN AND LOVED

  Clouds are so much fun to watch, after a while you can start to predict when it's time to keep your camera handy. Cloud formations are by far the subject of the majority of my thousands of slides gathered over the last quarter century.

  Lenticular clouds are manifestations of large scale 'ripply' and 'hilly' layers of air forming clouds at their crests where critical thresholds of condensation are reached. this mid 1970's display was photographed atop the Mansion's roof, where I climbed from the third story windows hundreds of times.

  The same vantage point provided a grand view of a rainbow as the sunlight changed in color from the normal white of midday to the highly reddened last rays of sunset. At this time little more than the red light was left for a rainbow to display.

  This sunrise was photographed in the mid 1970's from what was at the time an empty field owned by St. Patrick's Seminary in Menlo park. Many a morning after painting all night I would top off the day with a walk to see such events with an unobstructed Eastern horizon.

  Sometimes the clouds even come to you. One distinctive Bay Area sight is that of fog rolling in from far out to sea being just barely contained by the coastal mountains, some spillage looking like a slow motion start of an ethereal deluge. On such a hill the fog laps at the slopes a short distance below me.

  From an airliner the coast can manifest itself not just in the boundary between land and sea, but in the interaction of the currents above the geography.

  This mosaic of video frames shows a massive stretched out overhanging edge of a storm front sweeping over Studio City in 1991.

  Another mosaic of video frames panning across the edge of a magnificent spreading anvil cloud. Shot from the parking lot of WQED Science effects in Glendale within a day of the previous image.

The undersides of cloud ceilings occasionally reveal themselves through fortuitous lighting. Another Mansion rooftop shot.