SkyWatch: Rain, but No Rainbow

Rain showers falling off to the east of Bryce Canyon, as seen from Rainbow Point, the southern-most and highest elevation stop on the road. The sun wasn't right to produce the namesake rainbow, I guess. This is a more colorful view of the canyon than in my last few posts from  here.... rain on the red rock just brings out those beautiful deep hues and an active sky is always key for me:)  Large view enabled for this one.. enjoy!
Check out the SkyWatch homepage every weekend for more interesting sky images from around the world.

Faerieland

Now there IS an actual area of Bryce named Fairyland Point, but this is NOT it:) I just thought the name so appropriate for this scene, taken not too long after the one in my last post... these clouds are the fringe areas of the storm seen in that shot.  I don't think you can find shapes and textures like this anywhere else in the world.  Although the colors here are fantastic, I find them almost a distraction in a heavily textured view like this, especially in mid-day light where they are much too harsh for my taste, thus the black and white treatment. For most of the day, the clouds were softening the light, making it much nicer to work in color and the rain showers really seem to intensify the red in the soil when it gets wet.
Color stuff coming up next....

Sky Watch: Clouds with Virga Over the Canyon

I'll be regaling you all with countless, serene scenes of Fall color from Utah soon enough, but I thought I'd tease you with some black and white in the meantime.  This one just looks more foreboding in monochrome:)   I'm really disappointed if I travel somewhere to shoot and see nothing but blue skies... in this case the forecast held true and we had lots of interesting weather to go with the beautiful colors.  (No snow like I experienced a couple of years ago during the same weekend, though.)  This thunderstorm started as a little puff of cloud in the mid-morning and grew very rapidly as we were making our way down Bryce Canyon from point to point (my wife had never been here), finally dumping rain... and cooling the temperature from comfortable in a tee shirt to cool in a jacket, in a matter of a few minutes. It was pretty much like this every day, so a couple of times during the trip we had to give up or hurry up due to thunder and lightning, but overall it was very worth it for scenes like this and the temperature was quite pleasant the whole time.

Visit the SkyWatch home page each Friday for more great sky pics from all around the world.

The Mathematics of Nature

Bryce Canyon Sunrise - Utah

Something a little different for this post, inspired by a TV documentary that I saw a few months back, about mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot.

We tend to think of math and geometry as applying to man-made objects.. they have width, height, length and angles that can be expressed and measured in ways that we are familiar with. Nature on the other hand, may seem to be random and chaotic, totally free from the laws of math and geometry. Not so. Mandebrot discovered the formulas that can express most forms of nature in mathematical terms.. it's just a different kind of math, known as "fractals"... the term that he coined for it.
In reality, many of the the most amazing things in the natural world follow these fractal formulas: trees and plants, waves, mountain ranges, canyons, clouds, coastlines, even the capillaries within our bodies are all examples.
I'm strictly a visual person, certainly no math whiz... (one year of engineering in college and I realized that my calling was going to be elsewhere), but it's interesting to realize that everything really is tied together, art and science, if you look at it from the right perspective.  I leave it to you to read further if you're interested... I came across a really cool website that explains a lot of this in very visual and easy to understand terms here.. most artists, photographers and just plain nature lovers will think: "wow.. this makes total sense!", when they look at these pages.  It goes into other art-realated topics also, such as the "golden proportion", known by artists for centuries, and seems to be part of our innate, human sense of beauty. 

So, what is an artist's interest in all this? Well, computers have made the application of fractal formulas easy and practical.  The other images here (click for a larger view) are ones that I generated using a 3D terrain modeling software. The natural features... rocks, clouds, dunes and even the textures, are all created with fractal math.. there is no actual picture mapping utilized anywhere in the image.  I didn't go all out with the detail.. I could keep working for an even more photo-realistic effect, but this is good enough for a comparison to the real photo of Bryce Canyon at the top of this post.

It's basically "virtual photography"... the "camera" acts just like the real deal.. move it around as you wish, select the focal length, depth of field..everything.  Of course all the basic principles apply: composition, texture, color theory and lighting.  If only the real world was so easy though... you can literally carve and move mountains, then choose the time of day, along with a control of the elements limited only by your imagination. If you've watched a sci-fi, fantasy or animated movie in the last ten years or so, you've surely seen a much more sophisticated use of this technology, but this was done just sitting here at home on my everyday computer.  The tree was an afterthought as I was writing and took about 5 minutes to compose and render!

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles,

and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.
—Mandelbrot, in his introduction to The Fractal Geometry of Nature