Breeding ground

I took these photos Wednsday in the late morning as I was preparing to head on out to drive to Telluride with an associate.  I’m going to post a series of images from a thunderstorm that we watched last weekend at the end of our hike and saw a new storm starting to form right in front of my office.

During about a 20 minute conversation I watched this baby grow what I think was an additional 10,000 vertical feet.  I never got to see the end result as this one drifted to the east in the hours that followed.

Note the anvil top on the storm. That is generally caused when the updrafts stop and the upper level winds blow the clouds off in a uniform direction. Directly in front of the anvil is another branch of the storm that continued to grow but was surpassed by another slightly behind it.

Telephoto panorama of a thunderstorm building over the Sandias.

A slightly larger panorama of the skyline.  You can see a larger image here if you like.

These images were all shot with my “carry in the car camera,” an old Olympus 4000 which was a replacement for an earlier model that I paid nearly $1,000 for in May of 2000. It’s a 4mp camera that some cell phones currently rival, at least in photo size.  There is some color distortion because of the fact that these were shot through tinted windows.   I went outside to try and shoot but the view from the 3rd floor was the best I could do.