Chasing Clouds: Harry De Zitter’s Gulf Coast Skies

Harry De Zitter had been standing on the finish of Naples Pier for practically an hour, pointing his lens on the sky. Unlike the fishermen round him, he wasn’t ready for a catch—he was watching the clouds.

Then a pelican soared into body. He snapped the shutter. “I was ecstatic,” he says, laughing. “I was jumping around like crazy, and the guys fishing looked at me like I was insane.”

Born in Belgium and raised in South Africa, the Naples-based photographer traveled the world, taking pictures high-profile celebrities and promoting campaigns for manufacturers like Lancôme and Nike. He’s revealed the fantastic thing about the dusty streets of Marfa, Texas, and the prepare platforms in Zushi, Japan. Despite his globetrotting and glitzy connections, few sights spark extra inspiration than Southwest Florida’s clouds. 

The Gulf Coast’s lengthy, flat stretches type a sprawling canvas overhead. Our salty ocean spray and excessive humidity meet within the environment, swirling into ominous thunderheads and expansive cottony cumulus clouds that refract gentle simply so. Different occasions of 12 months deliver their distinct charms—from winter’s wispy cirrus clouds set in opposition to crisp skies for an impressionistic sight to spring’s rising humid haze and puffy rippled patches. 

But Harry is most drawn to summer time’s drama, its towering thunderheads and effervescent cumuli, heavy with the anticipation of an incoming storm. His clouds are like buildings within the body—outlined, billowing kinds and stacked lots. 

Sometimes, solar rays filter by the clouds, reminding the photographer of the heavenly iconography from his Catholic upbringing. “[Other times], the sky is moody with storms, and there’s hardly any light.” The pelican shot from Naples Pier captures certainly one of Harry’s extra contemplative skies—layered clouds, softened gentle and a way of the Earth holding its breath earlier than the climate shifts. The fowl glides by the highest proper of the body, animating the stillness. Taken in August 2019, the photograph was the primary of Chasing Clouds, his 20-image sequence photographed on the Pier and on the Goodland Bridge east of Marco Island. “There’s a whole variety of moods,” he says of the gathering.

 “Every day, a massive exhibition of clouds comes in, and every day is different. It was a canvas gifted to me by nature. It’s absolutely epic.” 

Harry shoots with precision, tenting out and preventing lens-fogging humidity till his ultimate cocktail of visible parts coalesces. “If it’s not a perfect composition, it’s not shootable,” he says. He appears for a singular combine: daring gentle, wealthy tones and clouds that twist into sudden kinds. Every horizon line have to be completely stage and plumb. He eschews tourist-typical vistas, focusing as an alternative on what he sees as Southwest Florida’s defining traits: summer time’s afternoon tempests, mangrove swamps and the graphic simplicity of solitary waterfowl suspended mid-glide in opposition to a brooding, cloud-thick sky.

Most of his pictures are grounded solely by a skinny thread of horizon on the backside of the body. “Other details on the horizon would interfere and contaminate the composition,” he provides. 

Many artists, weather-watchers and daydreamers draw inspiration from Southwest Florida’s luminous cloudscapes, however in Harry’s palms, the formations tackle a cinematic high quality, charged with stress, but composed. Strong contrasts and low horizon traces, with beneficiant detrimental house, create a way of order that reinforces the atmospheric weight. Each picture freezes a fleeting second—clouds poised to erupt in rain or break into one final shaft of sunshine. Though two-dimensional, the images really feel immersive; you’ll be able to virtually really feel the thick, Florida air urgent in.

For the compositions captured on the Goodland Bridge, he let the panorama in—including a delicate sense of place and nod to his topics’ origins. “It’s almost like the epic clouds are born over the Everglades, and then they move over to the Gulf,” Harry says. The fleecy clouds and tangles of wetland vegetation seem in black and white to emphasise the compositions’ texture and gravity.

The sequence is pure appreciation, an artist acknowledging Mother Nature’s distinctive palette. “Every day, a massive exhibition of clouds comes in, and every day is different. It was a canvas gifted to me by nature. It’s absolutely epic,” Harry says, his eyes extensive with marvel.