Late in the afternoon yesterday, a huge cloud began building over Glacier National Park. By 2000, it towered tens of thousands of feet over the park. Not quite a supercell, it exhibited the classic anvil form of a cumulonimbus formation.
I photographed the cloud with a variety of techniques. After making color images, using a polarizer, from wide angle to telephoto, I mounted a 55mm, f/2.8 Micro-Nikkor manual focus lens on my DSLR, focused on the scene, and attached infrared and polarizing filters. For this kind of work, I prefer manual focus prime lenses with IR focusing marks.
Below are two images from the dozens that I made. More information on thunderstorms is available in the Wikipedia and at the National Weather Service. And Wetter Foto in Germany has more than 12,000 cloud images on its website, including a spectacular image of a cumulonimbus.
A huge mushroom shaped cloud, probably a giant thunderstorm that may have risen from the plains west of Cardston, Alberta, towers behind the Teakettle ridge and Heavens Peak in Glacier National Park. Taken from a point 1.5 miles west-northwest of Kalispell using a digital SLR equipped with infrared and polarizing filters.
The base of the anvil rises behind Heavens Peak.