I got to bolt out with the cameras for a little bit on Friday evening, and my first target was the sharp display of light rays piercing the cloud cover. Of course, a photo like that deserves a nice foreground object, and I chose the Square Buttes north of town. I have a couple of spots marked in the GPS that provide a perfect vantage point of the buttes from across the Missouri River, but it takes a while to get to them. Along the way I began to sense that the clouds may be clearing slightly, diminishing those rays, so I stopped for this quick shot.

I arrived at my usual spot as planned, and by now it was obvious I had mere minutes before the clouds broke. I opted for a couple of quick roadside shots rather than a carefully planned hike, but I like what I came away with. This is the northern end of the Square Buttes, a portion that doesn’t look very square at all. I knew that there wasn’t enough time to hike to a point where I could include the wide, flat tops for which these buttes are known, so I opted for some “bumps and water” in the foreground instead.

One artifact of note is the “glow” where the hills meet the darkening sky. I originally saw this in Photoshop and thought it was an artifact of processing, as I did lighten the foreground a little bit. I thought I had been heavy-handed in that processing; however, a close inspection of the original raw photos shows that the glow on the hills was actually there. Whether it was caused by the rays somehow or the breaking cloud cover behind the hills, I don’t know.

With that, the sky cleared briefly and I had to reboot my little photo trip in search of a different type of photo. A storm rolled through shortly thereafter, but I was caught out of position and didn’t manage to capture the ominous front as it approached. Instead I returned to the garage and set out to tinker on stuff for a while, but my cameras and I returned to sunset duty on Sunday – this time with two little boys attending – and I’ll post the results of that photo dash soon.