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If you’ve ever seen the excellent documentary called Close Encounters Of The Third Kind you’ll know most of the time a spacecraft flies off, or drops down, the clouds roll and expand around it, kind of like how this cloud looks. Independence Day with Will Smith (based on a true story) had the same effect but with a little more oomphf.

Technical Stuff: I think I had the camera closed one stop, but this was like a year ago and there was a lot of crazy stuff going on… I had just switched conditioners, there was the thing with the monkey and I was still leaning pretty heavily on the Diet Pepsi. I was really in no shape to be logging my settings. I do know I used my little Kodak EasyShare C533, it was really early and this is from my balcony.

Pretty close to the end of “Close Encounters”, when the Mother Ship finally appears, there are two things you should watch for: 1. R2-D2 hanging off the spacecraft, and; 2. the massive space-city doesn’t descend from the clouds, it rises from behind the mountain… like it was hiding back there with Richard Dreyfus and Melinda Dillon the whole time.

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