Life With Mistress Sky — TimothyBentley.Photography

When I created my first coffee table book, I searched for a name for it. At length I settled on this: Mother Water, Mistress Sky.

I named it for “Mother Water” because she is our matrix. From the water all life emerged, and we owe her respect, as our mother, as our eternally supportive caregiver.

But “Mistress Sky”? Well, she’s a character of an entirely different complexion. In my panoply of goddesses, she’s the lover – teasing, flamboyant, risqué, inconstant, fleeting, engrossing.

And when she dons her colourful wardrobe on the horizon at sunset, she’s impossible to resist.

Clearly, I’m not alone in this idea. Here’s Andrew capturing a sunset over the Gulf of Mexico, on the western beach of Captiva Island, Florida.

My focus as a landscape photographer is largely on the forms of land and water, often in the countryside, sometimes in the city where I reside for most of the year. But wherever I am, I always have an eye for the sky.

And what I see can rock me. Flying a drone over the Thousand Islands at sunset on this summer day, I discovered a marvelous combination of clouds of various shapes and colours, of red, blue, orange, and purple.

This astonishing sky was reflected in deeper tones in the waters. The islands were black with night. And a few spots of light on the horizon suggested the distant town of Gananoque.

But it’s Mistress Sky who really makes this photograph.

In other images, she may not be the lead player. She’s there in the background, adding a spice of drama to other features of the landscape.

Here, for instance, she provides a remarkable setting for the CN Tower in Toronto. It’s a dramatic silhouette, photographed from the water.

Also in the city, on a clear day in spring, I imagined that these blossoms were not so much framed by the sky as painted on it, as if on a canvas.

Spring blossoms are painted on a blue canvas.

Their intense reds and greens form a glorious contrast to the blue above them.

But more often than not, the sky itself is the star of the show.

On occasion, I’ve been stopped in my tracks by one of her less frequent manifestations: ice crystals forming high in the stratosphere. From a science perspective, they refract the light of the sun by 22 degrees, like a rainbow, even on sunny days.

From a popular perspective, we nickname those optical phenomena “sundogs”. Similar to light passing through a prism, they contain all the colours.

When a single sundog is high in the sky, it can look like a faint rainbow snared in the clouds, but in this happy case, I was able to capture two of them from the deck of the boat, on either side of the setting sun.

From a compositional point of view, this image is further enhanced by a path of reflected light, leading the eye across the St. Lawrence River toward the horizon and the setting sun itself.

But perhaps the most interesting feature of this photograph is that, if you look closely, the sundogs seem to form the lower part of a half circle around the sun.

For reasons I don’t understand, the sky appears to have a different intensity within that boundary than it does outside.

That’s also true of this double rainbow, captured over Gananoque late on an August day. The sky seems markedly lighter within the curved shape.

You can see the second rainbow faintly, at the top right of the photograph.

A double rainbow arcs above the Gananoque Marina.

The source of their light is behind us, reflecting brightly from distant horizontal walls and the tour boat, silhouetting a stroller beneath a lamp post on the dock of the marina.

Further in the distance, the sky is the featured performer, as unseen rain showers refract the sunlight to create these two colourful arcs.

I had to run on wet slippery docks to get to the ideal spot to capture this image. Perhaps that’s a sign of utterly enthralled I am by our Mistress Sky.

This one I called for fun, “Moon landing”. Of course, the aircraft is actually a quarter million miles from the moon.

A passenger plane prepares for landing on the moon.

But I love the composition, and to my eye, the hazy clouds add an appealing texture to the sky.

Here’s another aircraft against a dramatic sky. This one’s a Bombardier Q400 gaining altitude after an early evening takeoff from the Toronto Island airport.

A Q400 takes off into a sunstreaked sky.

The diagonal streaks below it in the image, are actually much higher in the sky, contrails formed at perhaps 30,000 feet by water vapour emitted from jet engines.

This is a very active sky, with the higher clouds still reflecting the sun, and the lower clouds black because, from their perspective, the sun is already below the horizon

Let’s turn from flying machines to living creatures. In this photograph taken above Eastern Ontario, lovely puffy clouds dominate the sky, contrasting with two hawks as they patrol for prey .

At dawn near Humber Bay, Toronto, I awoke to see an incoherent golden sky. Although I love my bed, I guessed that there was potential here for some special photographs.

So I pulled on my clothes, grabbed my camera and headed for a spit of land facing east.

In the distance, I could see Toronto Island, a black streak between the water and that fascinating panoply of clouds. As the rising sun continuously re-painted the colours of the sky, I took several dozen photographs.

Then a solitary gull strayed into my field of view, searching for breakfast, oblivious of the observer.

For me, that made the picture, and compensated for having to arise from my comfort zone.

Another day, this time on the St. Lawrence River, I stood on the boat’s deck, facing west toward the Thousand Islands International Bridge. There I saw a sky rich in white patterns, and containing a mystery.

I’ve reproduced it here in monochrome, which I think heightens the sense of drama and increases the contrast.

Streaks of cloud over the photographer in the 1000 Islands.

The streaks of cloud seem to emanate from a narrow source over the land. But as they approach the photographer, they spread and evolve into puffy patterns.

And curiously, in the lower third of the image, there’s a strange oblong hole, caused by an unexplained phenomenon. Some days I imagine I can see an extraterrestrial craft hovering in it!

Whenever I’m outdoors, I watch the sky. On special days, I see streaks of high cloud that have formed into ripples, reminding me of beach sand under shallow water.

Wave clouds high in a brilliant blue sky.

These so-called “wave clouds” are created when air is forced upwards over hills or mountains. As gravity then pulls the air back toward earth, the cloud begins to oscillate, creating the beautiful ripple effect we see here.

Next, a very different day at the marina on Bronte Creek, Ontario. A storm is on the way.

Above us, fast-moving low clouds are turning black. The wind blows them into constantly shifting shapes, and as the sun sets, the colours on their undersides are becoming more intense.

Storm clouds menace sailors at Bronte Harbour.

For a photographer enamored of Mistress Sky, there is no question of taking shelter in the cabin of the boat. So, with an enthusiastic grandson, Noam, at the helm of the dinghy, we drive into the harbour to take dozens of photographs, our enthusiasm only slightly dampened by fat drops of rain.

Not till those showers transform into a downpour, do we head back to the cozy refuge of the mothership.

At first glance, the image below seems equally threatening. It’s a roiling, broiling sunset over the dark forest near Caledon, Ontario. It’s replete with danger - or so it appears.

Roiling clouds suggest a battle in the skies.

In reality, these battling clouds are far distant from each other, some layered in the troposphere, some higher in the stratosphere. From our perspective on the ground, they seem to combine, partly obscuring the sun.

Although the image looks menacing, even malevolent, the reality was quite different, an intriguing but uneventful transition from afternoon to evening, to be followed soon by darkness and a peaceful sleep.

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