Just before settling in to a long winter's lap...top session, I walked around Capitol Lake this morning for a bit of cloudspotting. The clouds were flying--wisps of stratus and low nimbostratus seemed to be racing toward the northeast. There were patches of blue sky and strange formations of cirrocumulus and cirrus beyond. As usual, the sky is more dynamic when you let it perform for you.

Thanks to my dog that stops every twenty seconds to mark his territory, my walk was punctuated by photo ops. About halfway around the lake, I spotted a small arc of a rainbow in the lake (below). I've never seen this before. I am not sure I can describe the layers of refraction and reflection that produced this optical phenomenon. In one shot, I captured water in three very different guises--the lake, the clouds, and the rainbow.

A few hundred yards further, I spotted something that looked like a cumulus cloud that had fallen out of the sky and into the lake (below). It was not a cloud, but some errant piece of Styrofoam that had floated down from the upper lake. It was garbage, but darn if I didn't instantly cast it as the lead character in a childrens story: The landfill-bound piece of Styrofoam that wants to be a cloud, but can't figure out whether to float into the sky to join its cumulobrethren or dive into the lake where these other clouds seemed to be residing.Luckily, I stopped there.