This is one of those photos that looks extremely dramatic, but has a boring and mundane backstory. I was doing housework - probably laundry or something equally exciting and glamorous - when I looked out of our bedroom window and saw these clouds. The sun was just about to set (nearly 9pm on a mid-July evening), causing some severe and dramatic lighting, and the storm cell was boiling up over downtown into higher altitude winds. I ran, grabbed my handy XT, slapped on the el cheapo 300mm lens and started messing around to see what I could capture. And then a plane moved into the frame. It was far away from the storm cloud, but the lighting and long focal length made it look like a narrow escape. Often, people think this photo was taken from the air, and that I was shooting down on the cloud. I wasn't so lucky.
This photo's one of my more popular ones on Flickr, and has been published a few times - most recently in a photo book featuring Calgary photographers. But... it was shot from my bedroom, through a window, with a cheap telephoto lens.
