Autumn: Landscapes, Clouds & Weather

Flatirons Sunrise Sky. Boulder, Colorado, 2011

In many locations, especially in Colorado, fall is a wonderful time for the landscape photographer willing to put on some boots and warm clothes and brave the elements. It is my favorite season for photography. Here in Boulder, the cold fronts start moving through with regularity, the leaves are changing color, the first snows begin painting the high country white, the high winds return after a fairly tranquil (but hot!) summer, and the weather becomes generally less stable. This instabiliy brings with it one of my favorite subjects for enhancing a landscape photograph: clouds.

The Front Range area of Colorado acts like a huge speed bump for the arctic jet stream as these high level winds move farther south for the winter, creating some of the most unusual clouds I have seen anywhere except, perhaps, Patagonia. I don’t like to do landscape photography without a spectacular sky–plain blue skies are just BO-RING! So, I always keep my eye on the weather forecast and I love to head out to my favorite spots at sunrise or sunset when a strong weather front is either arriving or departing. Sometimes the weather can be so windy, wet or cold that you don’t accomplish much of anything; but, at other times, the most spectacular landscapes and clouds can present themselves.

Here I’ll throw out a hint for getting more precise weather information, especially about the altitudes of the cloud levels, visibility and so on. This can be critical to know whether you’ll have a view or whether you’ll be above or below the clouds at your chosen photo site.

Instead of going to a general weather website, like weatherunderground, try going to the National Weather Service’s Aviation Weather Center. Once on that site, the tabs in the left column that will interest you are “TAF”, which means Terminal Aerodrome Forecast (future weather conditions), and “METAR”, which means Meteorological Terminal Air Report (current observation). Once on the TAF/METAR page, be sure to select “Translated” to get the weather descriptions in plain English, otherwise you’ll get the hard-to-read code that the pilots use. Oh, and you’ll need to know he ICAO four-letter identifier of the airport nearest your area of interest (KBDU, for Boulder, CO, for instance) so simply click on the stations.txt link on the TAF/METAR page and scroll down or just Google the airport in question.

After a few of these autumn bad weather photo shoots, I now completely understand and admire John Muir for climbing to the top of the highest pine tree around in the middle of a wild wind storm. It was a wonderful, if a bit unconventional, way to experience the power and beauty of the Earth at it’s most spectacular. I probably won’t be climbing any trees anytime soon, but you’ll definitely find me on a trail somewhere in the high country when the lenticulars start forming over the Rockies.

May you also have bad weather during your next landscape photography session!