The bougainvillaea branch sticking up on it;’s own, makes it look like the foregound is giving the storm the finger.

This is another of those reference / stock images I use in the comics for creating backgrounds. It looks like porridge.

Come on, how could a person not photograph this? Aside from the near perfect spread of light, what I really like about this is the way the centre of the cloudmass is bright and filled with defined structure.

It all looks a little too perfect.

To days later, December 27th, and this was sunset. Yup, that’s bushfire smoke making the sky look like that. Thick enough that you could look at the sun as a discreet, hard edged disc with no discomfort at all.

So here’s a photo from my mother’s apartment. You can see the Harbour Bridge near the centre, and off to the left in a gap between the trees, a city building. The North Sydney skyline is to the right of the harbour bridge, and above it, the layer of smoke.

And here we go, the money shot.

On the right North Sydney, in the centre the Sydney Harbour Bridge, to the left the Opera House, and behind it, the city. Just to give you an idea of the amazing scale of this, and remember, it’s all smoke. The lighting was amazing too, that’s a pretty accurate image of the light gradient at the time.

On Xmas day in 2001 there were huge bushfires in Sydney’s outer western suburbs. As you can see in a later pic, the sky was solid smoke over my house. It was really eery. I’ve had worse. The first place I moved to had fires so close there were huge pieces of smouldering debris falling in the front yard.

But anyway on Xmas day I caught a ferry across the harbour to my mother’s place in the north east of Sydney. This was on the ferry trip over.

More of teh pretty. I always find it interesting to look at pictures like this, the light hitting those clouds is actually coming at them from an angle below them. The geometry of the situation really impresses me.

The structure of the underside of a cloud layer is so interesting, if you look really hard just off centre there’s a passenger aeroplane flying along.

I use a lot of these images as reference, or even as sky backgrounds in my comics.

It really helped that the deck of the Enmore house faced west, so you could get these sort of sunsets on stormy days. The light there reflecting up off the underside of the clouds. It really looks like something apocalyptic is happening off in the distance.

This was one of those amazing moments when light, shadow and colour all combine just so. All the shadows on the clouds match the background sky so well, they look somewhat unreal.