There are challenges for the photographer on days when puffy clouds cover the sky. At worst the subject will in the shadow of a cloud. At best the lighting will be uneven and potentially confusing. An opportunity in the situation is to get a bright subject against a dark background. This involves waiting for the clouds to cooperate and light the subject while dimming the background.

On such a day in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument (in Arizona near the border with Mexico) we drove the long loop road, and I stopped the car and jumped out whenever the lighting was in a cooperative mood. Fortunately clouds move slowly, so the lighting usually holds for five or ten minutes. Aside from getting more exercise than usual, I obtained this image of saguaros lit against the the cloud-shaded hills.

It is a panorama spliced horizontally from two images, then cropped to be about one-and-a-half images wide. Is there any doubt that the two brightly lit suguaros are critical to the image? I used Photoshop™ to blot them out, and the image sinks to boredom.

Even with the cacti, the image composition is not the best. The focal cacti are too near the right edge. I didn’t take another frame to the right, so it’s too late for a different panoramic composition. Instead, I tried tightening the composition within the frame I had.

Is that better? I’m not sure, but probably not. The formal composition is better, but the frame has lost interesting things, like the fuzzy cholla in the left foreground of the original. I will instead attribute the unbalanced composition to dynamism of great art.

Incidentally, the bush with the yellow flowers is creosote bush, a reliable feature of Sonoran desert landscapes. The bush is named for its resinous fragrance.