I took this sequence a few days ago not long after I woke up. It was one of those opportunities that you know will only last a few minutes so I took these from our bedroom window prior to drinking any coffee, or smoking any cigarettes – my usual two activities that normally preceed speech, let alone anything that even remotely requires some effort.

But the sky was just too beautiful to miss and after taking half a dozen shots (that turned out to be totally hopeless, not least because I shot them as jpep's rather than RAW images) I managed to concentrate well enough to get these.

All three of these images are roughly true to the original scene though I chose to darken all three of them. No matter how I tried to match them to how I remembered the scene, all three ended up looking either vaguely washed out or, worse, my attempts to get the colour balance correct seemed to introduce an unacceptable amount of colour noise.

So, while these images aren’t entirely ‘accurate’ I do think that they capture the mood, beauty, and some of the clarity of this early morning winter sky.