In any location where a cloudy sky meets the horizon, whether a coastal setting or a mountainous one, there will often be interesting interactions of sun light with those clouds. The colors yielded by those sun/atmosphere interactions, especially those on the red end of the spectrum, can often yield gaze-, photograph-, or even poem-worthy responses by a viewer. We’ve all seen sunrises with wispy and discontinuous cloud formations that produced a variety of colors, but I recently woke to an unusual situation. Here the cloud formation was uniformly dense, so that there was no refractive color distribution. The sun seemed to burn a hole in the cloud with a uniform halo of color surrounding it. Still, the sun was so bright that my camera sensor was pushed beyond its recording capability. Technically, there are no data for the sun in this image, and therefore, no color. Probably not a good photograph for some purists, or maybe the question, “Why didn’t you use a neutral density filter?” Well, this was a “grab” shot. I had not the time to apply a filter. Furthermore, what is presented here is closer to reality than a filtered image. In summary, that’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

J…