While I’m a photographer at heart, I’m no meteorologist – except that one time years ago when I hammed it up on a CNN tour, reading from a teleprompter and “predicting” Atlanta area weather against a green screen like some wizened weekend weatherman. The experience was all fun and games.
Despite not being a weather expert, as a landscape photographer, I’m often asked, ‘How did you capture THAT image?’ The answer largely boils down to timing the light, which is deeply influenced by the weather – especially those colorful skies.
The real meteorologists say that these vivid winter sunsets, like the one I snapped in Asheville on a crisp evening this week, get supercharged by incoming storms. As the sun dipped below the Blue Ridge horizon, it ignited the sky in fiery oranges, pinks, and golds, with wispy cirrus clouds streaking high above like icy feathers, refracting low-angled light to scatter blues and amplify those warm tones for a vivid spectacle.
I’m told that these pre-storm enhancements stem from high-level clouds like cirrus and cirrostratus forming ahead of moisture-laden fronts, acting as filters that diffuse sunlight through winter’s cleaner, drier air. Subtler altostratus layers near the horizon add smooth color gradients, while the season’s lower sun path extends the glow—turning twilight into an extended drama.
With a winter storm barreling into East Tennessee and Western North Carolina tomorrow—rain turning to snow (1-3 inches possible in the mountains), gusty winds, and temps plunging to the teens, this sunset’s a classic Appalachian harbinger, echoing folklore from Smoky Mountain old-timers who eyed “blood-red horizons” as blizzard warnings amid the peaks’ air-funneling effects. When experts predict these conditions, my Boots-on-the-Ground experience leads me to chase these fleeting beauties through my lens in our mountain backyard.
Many of the HoneyBadgerImages are on display at instagram.com/honeybadgerimages.
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