Haymes Images

Image ©2011 Tom Haymes

One of the things I really like about the fisheye (10.5 mm) and the ultrawide (12-24mm) lenses I have are what they do to clouds. They transform interesting clouds into really interesting clouds. In the case of the fisheye they introduce otherworldly curvatures that are reminiscent of alien worlds. In the case of the 12-24 (which I almost almost always shoot at 12 mm) it can create this awesome streaming effect that can just suck you into the photo.

In this case, I was able to combine that otherworldly effect with a strong terrestrial object (Heritage Plaza in downtown Houston, Texas) to create what I thought had shades of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Normally, I wouldn’t have been able to get away with this much backlighting but I was aided by Nik Software’s excellent package of software tools (in this case Silver Efx) which allowed me to make precise adjustments to the image without a huge amount of PhotoShop work. Black-and-white had the effect accentuating the clouds as well as strengthening the effect of the “monolith.” Overall, I’m pretty happy with the effort.