We received 4" of rain in the past 48 hours. Flooding everywhere. All of a sudden yesterday the skies cleared and temps rose. I caught the last of the thunderheads peaking over the treeline right at sunset fading off to the North East. Critiques encouraged.
It's a beautiful thunderhead indeed, Brian! However, I think this illustrates the difficulty sometimes - quite often, actually! - that what looks beautiful to behold may be hard to turn into an equally satisfying photographic image. In this case, that grey stripe of pathway draws attention but is not actually interesting to view, rather creating a distraction. Also, it is hard to balance the sunlit cloud with foreground detail in shadow, which is still dark and hard to "read", although I suspect trying to balance these has led to a halo along the skyline, especially at the right.
It's hard to be sure, but from what is visible here, I suspect I might have moved in beyond, or to the right of that nearby tree at right, zoomed in, and just had the cloud "nestled" in a shallow vee of treeline in complete silhouette, something like the attached edit. I am trying to simplify the image, and focus attention on the cloud formation.
Nice edit Chris. What i like now are the cool lines/layers of the image. The top edge of the clouds and trees have an interesting pattern that compliments each other.
I would suggest cooling to color down a bit too. There's the 'golden hour' and then there's orange.
Cool this down and crop it and you'll have a winner!
Great Suggestions! Thanks!
Still learning what is helping out nature and what is painting with crayons LOL