Great Basin School of Photography

Weather Timelapse: Lenticular Clouds in the Eastern Sierra
Lenticular clouds are my favorite weather phenomenon, and my favorite to photograph and produce movies of. Fortunately we get them several times each year. Here’s the complete story of some we had earlier this week through sunset, in photos and video.

A few nights ago I watched lenticular clouds form over the Three Sisters in the Sweetwater Range, across Topaz Lake on the California/Nevada border in the Eastern Sierra. It looked like a little sunset light might get through, so I took a few photographs, and set up my camera to capture a time-lapse sequence of several hundred more, so I could convert them into a video.

As the direct sunlight left the scene and the light faded towards the blue light of twilight, is looked like the cloud cover was too thick, and sunset simply wasn’t going to happen.

Then a hint of orange started to appear, and brighten, at the bottom of the stack of clouds.

I reframed the image to capture detail of the evolving light over the Three Sisters.

The sunset light was brief, but intense, and the roughly 1000 photos that I took to capture the moment payed off!

I processed a few hundred of the images into a time-lapse video so you could see the whole event.  Here’s the best edit I’ve produced so far: