Cloud Nine

Hello People! 
Britt from Ranch Life has started to host a monthly challenge on her blog. I have been getting into taking pictures of the sky recently, so I was 'on Cloud 9' when I saw that her July monthly challenge was on Summer Skies! ;)
Guys, as I've mentioned before, I am a picture maniac (actually, I only recently became that way), and I  took over 700 pictures of the sky. No joke. So it was slightly hard to narrow it down to just 42 pictures, (with two extra being my brother's picture, and three extra being non-July photos) which is still quite a bit of a ridiculous number, but I did my best :) [Britt, if you choose this one to share, I'm sorry for it's length :) ] The majority of these pictures are raw, untouched by editing, except for two, and then one or so cropped. So, you're getting the harsh originals, folks :) I tried to be creative with these, so I hope you like them!

I am organizing these according to how they might appear in a day--Of course, a day always starts with a sunrise. After that, who knows but maybe it'd be a pure blue, clear sky? Then the wind starts to blow and in come sailing a few clouds. Pretty soon the whole sky might be clouded over. And then the day begins to come to a close and the glorious display of a sunset is splattered across the sky. Of course, after that, God hangs up the moon to rule the night. And then, after the moon comes out, you have just a cool picture in general, that doesn't exactly fit in with the whole scheme, except maybe the clouds came back and a storm breaks out.
Okay. Here goes.

Sunrise:
I rarely get up in time to see a sunrise, so I was elated when I had somewhere to be that required me to be up by 5:45am! It was my chance to kill two frogs with one stone! (Er, is it birds? :) Yes, I know it's birds, I'm just being silly)  The pictures were taken while I was sitting in the passenger seat of a moving car, so they aren't that great. But, hey, I got them! The first three are kinda the same, so sorry about that :)

You can just see the sun barely trying to peak it's head above the surface of the earth.

I had taken about a gazillion pictures before I decided I had taken enough and should put the camera away,  and then, BOOM, out pops the sun! 

Normal, blue sky:
Blue sky can be pretty, but it's also pretty boring to take a picture of. So, I tried to make it interesting by 1) bordering it with trees, and 2) taking the picture with branches against it. Of these two pics, the first is my favorite. I love how it shows, along with the blue sky, the three different shades of green and a bug in mid-air :) What do you think? 

Clouds: 
Okay, folks, this is a pretty big category! Clouds can come in many different shapes and sizes and sometimes they are so interesting. I was a little bored to find for the first while, that the clouds in the sky were pretty average, big, puffy cloud formations, that look like whipped cream wigs or marshmallows, sometimes with flat and light grey tableau looking bottoms, sometimes with lumpy stomachs. But then there struck a day where the sky was crazy beautiful with lacy cloud patches and average cloud formations! It was a really pretty day, just saying. 

 I added this picture because I thought it looked sort of like an elephant playing with a ball. Can you see it?

I know the lighting in this picture isn't very good, but I thought it was cool how it looked like a cyclone.

And these clouds look like you could just jump into a world of lacy fluffiness :)

I experimented with taking pictures in the reflections of a car. Some of the pictures came out really nice and clear. Some of them looked like a picture posted in the windows of the car. But in looking through them, I realized that a good amount of them were picturing more of the landscape than the sky so I only shared this one. What do you think? 

This looks kind of like a sheet of ice, doesn't it? (At least when you enlarge it)

Fully clouded sky:

Sunset:
Of course you have to have pictures of sunsets and sunrises. Some of mine aren't the greatest, but I hope you still enjoy them.

Just slightly tipped with the display of the sunset

 This looks a bit like a fish, to me (Maybe a swordfish?). Swimming in the glory of God's painting :)

This, along with the following three pictures, were taken on the same night. The sky actually didn't look like this, nor did I adjust the picture at all. It was just the light balance that changed the sky to look way more orange than in reality.

This is more what the sky looked like in reality

My camera ran out of batteries right at the peak of the sunset, so I rushed to replace the batteries and then captured the almost-ending proclamation. Again, the picture isn't that great, but this is what it looked like. It sort of just descended into a pocket of clouds that I didn't know were there.

Night sky:
I was bummed that I didn't bring my camera to take pictures of fireworks on the 4th of July--I thought that would be some great July sky pictures to share, but either I didn't see the contest in time, or I just didn't have the presence of mind to think of bringing it or both. Nonetheless, I didn't bring it. But I did take pictures of the moon later. 

This was as the sun was going down, so it was still mostly light out. If you click on these two pictures to enlarge them, you can see craters around the edges a little bit. Interesting, eh? 

Lightning:
On the fourth of July, there was an awesome lightning storm. I SOOO wished that I had my camera with me, but, again, I didn't. My brother, however, decided to take a video of it on his phone. What did we do? Played the video until it showed a flash of lightning, paused the video, took a screen shot, and edited out the play button! Genius, huh? :)
Here it is:

Since it was taken off my brother's phone, it was a little grainy, etc. So I edited it a little bit. It didn't exactly help the graininess, but, it sharpened it a little bit. These are both the same picture, but one is edited, one is not. Can you tell which is which? Which one do you like better? 

And last but not least,
Sky from June:
As maybe you noted from the title of Britt's challenge, JULY summer skies, these pictures are supposed to be from July. They all are. But as I also mentioned in the beginning of this post, I was starting to be interested in sky photos before the challenge, and in the end of June, I did take some. I liked these a lot, so I decided, since this is a sky post, even though these last three pictures are not from July, I would share them with you.

I love in this one how there's about three different kinds of clouds in it! 

This is a small rainbow we saw.

And I just liked this one.

And with that, I conclude this post! 

How did you like it? What do you think of the pictures? 

"The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of His hands. Day to day pours forth speech and night to night reveals knowledge." ~Psalm 19:1-2

Blessings,

Julia <3

*Please do not use these photos without permission*