Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

This is definitely a night to remind me of mathilde's comment abouut the Baltimore sky.

I kept seeing flashes of light to the north that looked like police car strobes (especially coming from that direction -- I often see flashing blue lights from the intersection or from the bit of Fulton Ave. I can see from my house), but they were too infrequent. So I hauled myself off the bed (I'm not feeling well tonight) to have a look. Nope, it was lightning. Pretty, cloud-to-cloud, watch-it-move (not just FLASH) lightning. Some of it below the tree/roof line across the street, creating backlighting. Some of it above the rooftops but behind the cloud, casting a different kind of backlight. And some doing that wiggly-crawly-squirmy thing horizontally across the sky in sharp, bright traces. But that's not the freaky part, that's just unusually pretty.

I wrestled with the question of whether I had the energy to switch into "photographer mode", and finally decided that I'd kick myself a long time if I didn't, so I fetched a camera and a tripod, shot the tail end of a roll of colour film, and went to load a fresh roll into a more suitable camera. Since the sky was mostly blacks and greys, and the lightning mostly white-looking, I loaded black-and-white film. (I'm scraping the bottom of my film supply and don't have a lot of what I usually use left. I may not be able to do much shooting at Pennsic this year.)

There's black sky above my house and above Lombard Street (and a nice bright moon on the other side of the house). There are whitish shreds of cloud up over Fulton a ways north of here and hanging in the sky over the building across the street from me. And there was a dark grey cloud making a Huge Shape over top of the fluff-shards and puffy bits, looming like a broken sheet of something sticking up over the north half of the west side of Baltimore (okay, far west side -- looking off to the east toward MLK the sky looked rather different).

And that dark grey sheet gradually, over the course of half an hour, turned a most unusual shade of blue. An eerie, glowy kind of blue. A blue full of not-blue-ness, or blue-wrongness, or something. A curious blue that might be a lot of fun to explore in a blouse[1] or a car, but a Very UnCloudLike Colour. Did I mention the "glowy" aspect? (Not quite glowing, but it gave the impression it was about to luminesce at any moment.)

Freaking' pretty. Pretty freaky. Freatty. Preaky. (Preetky?) And a lighting situation that it would probably cost me an entire roll of slide film worth of trial-and-error to capture properly, and I'm not sure I'm quite ready to spend that much right now i just to catch a colour. (With a different foreground, maybe). But ... well, wow. I can think of at least two people on my friends list who would write utterly amazing descriptions of it (far better than what I'm doing) if they were here, but without a teleporter, oh well. And the lightning flashes were frequent enough that I'm pretty sure I got some decent lightning shots anyhow.

Anyhow ... glowy ... and un-cloud blue ... and, well, I guess I see what mathilde means. Preaky.

[1] I can think of a couple of my friends who would be extremely distracting in a blouse that colour in a shiny fabric.