Brewing of a Storm, Yosemite

 
Tech Info: Nikon D300s | Tokina 12-24 @12mm | ISO 200 | f/11 | 1/160 s | B+W Polarizer
 
Brewing of a storm as it heads to Yosemite National Park.
 
While returning from a weekend getaway to Yosemite National Park with family, noticed this cloud formation and I had to do a quick stop to get a shot at it.
 

The family getaway was fun. Though most of the time was spent in actually taking family shots, at many occasions, it did cross my mind to just change the lens and get one shot. With that thought in my head, I wasn’t completely myself during the initial stages. This didn’t go unnoticed by the wife and she just couldn’t take it anymore and finally said “Either you take pictures or forget about taking pictures and just have fun”. That statement made sense and I completely forgot about everything else and had a ball of a time with the kid.
 
While driving back, that little thought still lingered around and when we were nearing this spot, my eyes just lit up to the awesome cloud formation. Made a screeching stop to the side and was out with my gear, while the wife and kids were having a nap.
 
This was the first time that I ever saw a cloud formation like this. Probably I might have seen awesome storm clouds before, but they all must have been in passing. Its only after picking up a camera, that I pay a lot of attention to so many things that I would have taken them for granted earlier. Just having a look at this scene gave me a high. Didn’t had to use any drink to get this high and I was riding that high wave even while driving back as we reached home in 20% less time than the GPS had predicted. That high stayed with me for some days too. I’ve never felt like this before. There are times where I’m happy about the images that I’ve taken, but getting so worked up for just one image was something entirely new to me. Its more like I’m discovering myself – and that too without any silent meditation 🙂
 
Processing:

1. Used Lightroom 3 to convert the raw image and set the white balance to ‘Daylight’ for a more cooler sky.
2. One more conversion of the image with white balance set to ‘Cloudy’ for more warmer foreground.
3. Layered both images in Photoshop and used a gradient mask to reveal the sky from the ‘daylight’ WB set image.
4. Cloned out the distant car.
5. A curves layer for overall contrast.
6. Another curves layer for the road.
7. Cropped to remove the filter vignetting.
8. Resized the image for web.
9. Third curves layer for a slight vignetting effect.
10. Saved as 8 bit jpeg and added metadata, keywords through Bridge.

 
Hover your mouse over the image to see the Before version.