Sometimes you get lucky

Recently I was asked to do a series of landscape photos for a client (my brother).  He needed photos of a recent landscaping project he worked on and he needed them within a week.  Our schedules only aligned for three evenings – how to decide which one?  Since I was shooting outdoors, I decided to use the landscape forecast. Two of the days showed a score of around 2 for the golden hour and showed no hope of getting lucky.  The remaining evening showed a 4, which wasn’t a great number, but certainly showed there was some change it would work out.

We met that evening, and it was almost entirely overcast.  Disappointed, I started shooting as we did not have time to try another night.  Shortly after we started, the sun poked through the clouds for the first time in days (hence the lower score for the other two days).

The sun continued to peak through the clouds and started to change the color of the sky.  We ran back to the primary shoot location and were rewarded with an incredible display in the clouds: