Bird? Plane? ... Bird-plane

I love the shape of this cloud. My best guess, from looking around the interwebs, is that it's stratocumulus vesperalis - with this according to Wikipedia: "Stratocumulus vesperalis the specific type of stratocumulus clouds, are flat and elongated. They form in the evening, when updrafts caused by convection decrease making cumulus clouds lose vertical development and spread horizontally."

Whatever, I reckon it looks like a bird. Or a plane. Or maybe, even, a bird-plane. So when I saw this bird flying overhead, even though I had snapped a few shots at different exposures and hadn't had a chance to compare them to see what was best, I quickly set the shutter speed to what I thought would be the best, and snapped. Happily, I think I was right. 8)


... Hmmm ... It also looks a bit like a crocodile. ;-) whatever it is, it can be embiggenated.


I took a couple of sunset panoramas this evening too: this one has an actual plane beneath an actual bird - though hard to see at this resolution. I was disappointed, as I didn't notice the plane until it actually came much closer - by which time I had my camera away. If I had been 5 or 10 seconds slower in turning around after taking the shots for this I would have seen it, and got a shot of it coming out of the sunset. Never mind. And here's the other pano.

Addit: wow! By the thumbnail of my one year ago photo, I see that today marks two years since I started taking a daily photo (the first 62 were on Flickr, before I was introduced to blipfoto). Not a bad way to celebrate really: bird, clouds, sunset, nature... ^_^