Between Two Skies

I was traveling to Jamaica in 2015 for a business meeting when I looked out the window and became completely absorbed by what was happening outside the aircraft.

I took a series of photographs because the scene would not remain still.

The clouds beneath me looked almost like a landscape.

They rolled toward the horizon with valleys, ridges, shadows, and distant formations rising above them.

Above everything was another enormous layer of cloud, darker and heavier than the world beneath it.

And between the two was this narrow opening of light.

For those few minutes, I wasn't thinking about Jamaica.

I wasn't thinking about the meeting waiting for me when I arrived.

I wasn't thinking about work at all.

I was simply looking.

I had photographed landscapes many times before, but this felt different.

There was no ground beneath what I was seeing.

No road.

No building.

No familiar object to tell me how large anything was.

There was only atmosphere, distance, light, and clouds.

I wasn't looking at a landscape.

I was looking at a skyscape.

And for a few minutes, the destination disappeared.

Between Two Skies transforms an ordinary circumstance of business travel into an encounter with scale, atmosphere, and temporary stillness.

The photograph is structured around three broad visual layers.

A dark blue-gray ceiling occupies the upper portion of the frame.

Below it, an expansive cloud field stretches toward the horizon with the visual weight and topography of terrestrial terrain.

Between them, a narrow luminous band separates darkness from darkness.

That band becomes the emotional center of the composition.

Rather than presenting the spectacle as a conventional sunset, Colón allows cooler blues, muted violets, restrained oranges, and pale gold to coexist across the atmosphere.

A small vertical cloud formation near the right side of the horizon provides one of the few points of visual scale within an otherwise immeasurable space.

The resulting photograph is less concerned with destination than suspension: a temporary position between places, between layers of atmosphere, and between the responsibilities of departure and arrival.

Travel teaches us to think about destinations.

Where are we going?

When will we arrive?

What happens when we get there?

Business travel makes those questions even more specific.

There are schedules.

Meetings.

Responsibilities.

Times and places where we are expected to appear.

But occasionally something interrupts all of that.

You look out a window and realize that while you have been concentrating on where you are going, an extraordinary world has been unfolding beside you.

For a few minutes, there was nothing for me to accomplish in that sky.

Nothing to prepare.

Nothing to solve.

I could only look.

Perhaps wonder begins when the importance of our destination briefly gives way to the importance of where we already are.

Preserved as the seventieth accessioned photograph in the Francisco Colón Studio Photography Wing, Between Two Skies joins the Journeys collection as a study of observation, atmosphere, scale, and the unexpected experiences that occur between departure and arrival.

The photograph was created during a September 22, 2015 business flight to Jamaica and belongs to a surviving sequence documenting changing cloud and light conditions over several minutes.

Unlike many works within Colón's travel archive from this period, the photograph was created with an Apple iPhone 5 rather than a dedicated Canon camera.

The original EXIF metadata identifies the iPhone 5 rear camera with a 4.12mm f/2.4 lens and records the image at 7:00:12 PM.

The photograph was revisited in 2026.

The restoration was intentionally restrained.

Highlight detail along the luminous horizon was protected while shadow information within the lower cloud field was recovered sufficiently to reveal its layered structure. Local adjustments strengthened atmospheric separation without converting the scene into an exaggerated sunset.

The original color relationships between the cool upper atmosphere, illuminated horizon, warm distant light, and darker foreground clouds were retained.

A minor window reflection visible along the lower-left edge was removed during restoration. No clouds, atmospheric formations, or landscape elements were added or reconstructed.

Within the Studio archive, Between Two Skies represents the journey not as movement toward a destination, but as the unexpected experience encountered along the way.