Interesting Weather? Keep Your Camera at the Ready and Capture Skies

California has months and months of clear, blue skies. Great if you're a vacationer. A novelty if you've not experienced it before. Deflating if you're a landscape photographer. For the last two days, the San Diego skies have been graced with clouds in the morning and evening. Not jaw dropping, heaven-meets-earth clouds. But good, interesting clouds. The kinds of clouds that make for fine backgrounds. Here's a few: 

A few show promise as textures, too.

Since clouds are a rarer commodity where I live, I keep my camera nearby throughout the day when they appear. As I go about my daily routine, I take opportunistic shots of the sky. I'll step out of the back door and grab a few in the early morning before waking the rest of the family. A few more after dropping my kids off at school. I'll take another few on a walk around the block, recharging the mental batteries after several hours at a desk processing, blogging and writing. And a final few around sunset as I shuttle kids to and from their activities.

This week I captured around 40 pictures of clouds. I'll whittle that down, keep the best of the lot, and tag them in my photo library with "Background", "Clouds" and "Sky" so they are easy to find later. I know they will come in handy. The next time I have a great subject to shoot and the sky isn't all that exciting, I'll have a sky in my library to mask in during post.