Signature Sky Print

As I write, it is August 28, 2020, Friday. Yesterday, August 27, I took this photo, which was the day after hurricane Laura made landfall in south west Louisiana. The photo was taken from along a country road in west central Missouri, the northern edge of the Ozarks. It was during the evening drive I make five times a week to the dead end road, on public land, where I regularly run that I noticed this "Signature Sky". Earlier in the day, Laura had pushed far enough into where I live to cause a very much needed rain shower. By the time I was to run only this strangely lingering remnant of clouds, chem-trails and sun remained, juxtapositioning themselves in a kind of light not easily forgotten. So, I stopped the truck, got out and took this photo. The giant X in the sky seemed to be a metaphor marking, in time and space, the strangeness of the times in which we are all now living and experiencing. This digital photo only had levels adjusted, contrast increased and color cast changed. It is a photo-merge where two separate photos were combined. I took two vertically oriented shots in order to acquire the whole scene. I was shooting with a Nikon super-zoom 80-400mm lens which made it necessary to combine two vertically oriented photos, shooting at 80mm, whereas, if I'd had a 50mm or wider angled lens I could, obviously, have gotten the photo in one shot.