Weather - picked by John Clayton
Since 2004 I have been running my own amateur weather station at my home and publishing my daily observations illustrated by weather photographs on Flickr (Birmingham Selly Oak Weather). I also set up a Flickr group called The World Weather Group which currently has over 170 members from all round the world.
I work as website editor of the MetLink International Project of the Royal Meteorological Society. I think The Big Picture has been a really great idea, allowing amateur photographers from the West Midlands Region to publish their photos on the web, showing a huge diversity of interesting images and creating a truly fantastic world record in the process. The mosaic, I believe, will add a very significant cultural feature to the West Midlands scene.
The criteria I used in choosing my selection of favourite weather photos were these: They primarily have to show weather phenomena or the effects of the weather. So rainbow, storm clouds, a benign and beautiful sky at sunrise or sunset, snow, rain and flood. Not uncommonly photos submitted under the heading of weather primarily show landscape enhanced by the weather which is in fact secondary in the image. I also chose photos which seized the moment – nearly every scene I have selected would be gone in seconds or minutes except in the case of floods and even these are transitory.
I chose only one photo from each person’s submissions. In some cases I could have virtually filled the whole selection from just one person’s collection because there are some very talented weather photographers who contributed to The Big Picture. My absolute favourite is “Another Rainbow End” by Wendy Parry. It is a truly beautiful image of a very transitory and difficult phenomenon to capture on camera. I have taken many thousands of weather pictures but I have never caught an image of a rainbow like Wendy’s.
If you’d like to put together your own galley of “picks” on a theme, or just your favourites, email us at [email protected] and well put it together with you.
