I am returning to a small project I set aside last year: a script that scans the sky for clouds and traces their contours.
The work is far from finished, and the difficulties are instructive. Dark clouds and clouds sitting in shadow absorb so much of the blue spectrum that they become hard to separate from the sky behind them; the very quality that makes them read as heavy to the eye makes them nearly invisible to the script. Soft contours pose a related problem. Where a cloud dissolves gradually into sky, there is no clean edge to find, only a slow gradient that resists being drawn as a line.
However, I am optimistic. Both problems feel less like walls than like directions, and the script can be iterated forward from here. There is something fitting, too, in the difficulty itself: the subject I have spent years translating into marks and tiles turns out to be just as reluctant to be pinned down by code as it is by hand.
