About the Image(s)

Here is an image I took when I was recently doing some shopping for picture hooks. As I came out of the store, it was really windy and a storm was coming on to the valley over the mountains. I saw what appeared to be to large voids in the storm clouds like a pair of maws. I quick took out my phone and took a few pictures of the storm. I had thought at the time that it was a mountain wave effect on the clouds, due to the high winds, but later, on closer inspection of the image, I saw it was a pair of hills obscured in shadow that I had not seen.

The image was taken on a Pixel 9 using the built-in camera app using the automatic settings and selected the optical 2x zoom lens. Post processing was done in Photoshop 2024. First, I eliminated some distracting elements, a light pole and a car that was cut in half. Then I divided the image into sky and ground zones and then applied separate Camera Raw adjustments to both. In addition, I added several brightness/contrast adjustment layers to recreate the initial impression I had of a giant void inside the clouds. I finally cropped the image to 16x9 format.