Colorful Clouds from Black and White Photographs

B&W Cloud Photo with Color

One of my favorite things to photograph is clouds.  I have an ongoing series of mostly black and white photographs of clouds called Terra Nebulae, which (in my best Latin) means Earth Clouds.  I call it that because part of the inspiration for the photographs are NASA's amazing images of space clouds, which are called nebulae (nebula=singular).  Up until today I've been trying to reference these space photographs by turning my skies black and leaving out any Earthly objects like trees and airplanes.  I hadn't aded color, until TODAY!

This is the first real developmental shift in this series since I started three years ago, so that is really a big deal for me.  Where did the idea come from and how did I do it?  To explain that let me talk a little about how NASA takes those wonderful Hubble photographs.

When the Hubble Space Telescope takes its wonderful photos of nebulae it is actually taking black and white images.  It takes a series of exposures, each one sensitive to only a limited part of the light spectrum.  This allows them to look at infrared features which the human eye can't perceive, and to look at the different features that show up in the different spectra.  In order to give these photos the colors we all love, a computer program is used to layer and combine the photos.  The colors you see in these photos are usually not the same ones you would see if you were actually looking at it.

I've known about this for some time, but I didn't really know how that could help my work until I attended a NASA conference and saw a demonstration on how to use search, download, and develop your own Landsat data.  The Landsat program started in the 1970's.  It uses satellites to take close up images of the Earth.  Landsat data is the basis for Google Earth.  Well, Landsat satellites do the same thing as the Hubble Space Telescope.  When they photograph a section of the Earth's surface, they take multiple exposures using different wavelengths.  Fortunately, I found directions for how to take all these exposures and combine them to make different colored versions of Central New York.  After I started to get the hang of it, I thought, "Hey, would this work for my cloud photographs?"  It turns out that with a bit of creativity, you can utilize this process to help interesting colorful photos from black and white photos.

So what do you think?  Do you like the black and white photos better, or do you like the new direction?

Another Black & White cloud scene

I was having so much fun that I figured I would try the technique on a black and white photo I took out West.