Storm clouds, C&C please

[darkpbstar]

ok so for the 4th day in a row here we've had tornados again. This time only like 10 minutes from where I live, though while it happened I was down the road at the store, about 15 minutes the other way. Anyway, here are some photos that I got while I was at Lake Michigan. The clouds really looked amazing, especially for me since the storm shots and being outside around these storms is all new to me. oh yea, my camera was having problems focusing on these clouds, like I would hold the button, and it would focus, but wouldn't let me take a photo, so some aren't perfectly focused (probably all of them) but here they are anyway. If you have tips for my problem, I'd appreciate it.

 

[Jayson Prentice]

Not sure what time of day these were taken, but the white balance seems to be quite a ways off giving them that really blue hue. With the focusing, that is often a problem you'll have when doing images like this, to solve the problem I always just pick out something along the horizon that it can focus on to get it at 'infinity' and then set it to manual focus for to get the shot I want...

Just as an FYI on the storm... It definitely looks to be outflow dominant, meaning that a good shelf cloud may be in store. And that is what you have captured with the images, a nice shelf cloud coming towards the lake.

 

[mr_baseball_08]

#1 appears to be in focus. The last two definitely look out.

The WB is way off as these are way too blue. I'd definitely fix that and set the white- and black- points. I'd like to see more contrasty, dark, sinister look as these are "supposed" to be storm clouds.

 

[BoblyBill]

That's extactly what I was going to say... Looks like you have a pretty cool shelf cloud. Unfortunately, linier (sp?) systems like this don't produce tornados very often (this one did but not many do). But you will get some pretty good winds sometimes and they look just amazing I think! So, I pretty much I am just seconding what Jayson said.

 

[darkpbstar]

Thanks for comments/criticism. I too think they are amazing looking, it just feels creepy being out there and the shelf is just coming closer and closer, like it will engulf you, especially because they are so much lower than the obviously quite high clouds above. That was my first experience with a real shelf cloud, I'm sure I could've seen them in the past, but never noticed them, nor knew what one was. thanks