April 12, 2012 Chase near Goodland, Kansas

Chase season has begun, and a bit early at that, thanks to a Spring that seems to have roared in a good five weeks before she was due.  My first chase of the year was on April 12, 2012 in Kansas.  I started out by driving down to Dodge City, before adjusting north as the weather observations rolled in later in the day.  I spent a good deal of the afternoon chilling out at an automated gas station in Brewster, Kansas.  Quite a few other chasers had the same idea; just sit there and watch storms try to get going as they rolled to the north-northeast.  

Sadly, we sat and sat and sat, and not much happened.  Eventually, most chasers either picked a random storm or gave up and dropped south into Oklahoma, as the better storm setup the next day was down there.  

 Eventually, I too took off after a pseudo-random storm (I say pseudo-random because it really wasn't much to look at other than having a better updraft vault than most of the storms that had been rolling by).  This storm wasn't amazing, but it did eventually transition into a storm with some very pretty structure.

 This was shot after the sun went down, so the contrast isn't so great, but here you can see the updraft vault of the storm has taken on a very "LP" barberpole type look.  An LP supercell is a type of spinning storm that doesn't produce much precipitation.  What's happening here is that the upper level winds are so strong that they are literally blowing the updraft of the storm into a more diagonal shape and stretching it out.  The bottom of the updraft is at the center of the image, the top of it is at the upper right of the image.

A closeup of the updraft base -- I love how smooth the rotation makes the updraft look.  

October 7 Chase

Got a chance to chase in Nebraska on October 7 -- we had a nice cold front come through and linger in the area, touching off a few brief mini supercells mixed in with storm clusters and more linear segments. Basically, not a great setup, but you can't complain about any convection you get in October!

The southern side of a storm in central Nebraska.  Not too exciting, but like I said, can't complain for October!

Best thing to do on a boring chase -- take photos of everything else!  I'm not sure what this sign was about -- this reminds me a bit of the "Hoof and Mouth" warning signs you see in the U.K.  

This corn silo looked quite nice -- and was a good test to see how well it would look in an HDR.  The flare off of my new lens (the Tokina 11-16) is not too pretty, IMO.  

The light from the silo illuminated the corn in the foreground.  

This storm was tornado warned as I shot this photo (just on the eastern outskirts of Kearney, Nebraska).  Not sure why -- it looked half way interesting on radar, (with the classic mini supercell shape), but there wasn't much going on with the base of it, at least so far as I could see from the illuminated lights of Kearney.

Midway

This was shot over the course of two days at the 2011 Nebraska State Fair. There is something uniquely bizarre and exciting about the atmosphere at a fair midway, especially after dark. This is my first real attempt at shooting time lapse.

Technical details: This was shot with a Canon 20D capturing stills with an intervalometer; nearly 5000 photographs were required to make this video. It was primarily shot with a Tokina 11-16, but one of the shots was shot with a Canon nifty 50 1.8. The time compression is one second of video time = one minute real time. The fun thing about shooting this as stills is that the available resolution is technically near 4K, meaning it'd look as good on the silver screen as it does on Youtube. :) "I dunno" by grapes ccmixter.org/files/grapes/16626 is licensed under a Creative Commons license: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Skywave

I've been playing around with learning timelapse -- I still have a lot to learn. This was more a test of the equipment than an attempt at a good storm timelapse, though given that this was a pretty boring popcorn summer storm and that the camera still caught a cool rolling sky wave, I'm pretty excited. This was shot near Kearney, Nebraska.



Shot this with a Canon 50 using a Tokina 11-16 in sRAW1 mode. Exported to JPEGS in Adobe Camera RAW, then ran the JPEGS through VirtualDub with the MSU DeFlicker plugin, then loaded the resulting JPEGS into Photoshop to create the video. Surprisingly time consuming process.

Petapixel interview

Sweet -- Petapixel, a blog that I follow, recently ran an interview with me. If you've ever wondered about where to go to learn more about shooting storm photos, give it a read!

Photo by Lanette Epps; used with permission

August Arcus Extravaganza!

I was lucky enough to catch an absolutely STUNNING arcus cloud this past Sunday just north of Kearney, Nebraska. The incredible appearance of this storm is a combination of great storm structure and perfect lighting, with the sun setting behind the storm and blasting it with an orange glow. Storms like these in August are one of the reasons I love living in Nebraska.

These kinds of storms only very rarely produce tornadoes -- the primary threat these post are high winds (though not with this storm), hail, and catching flies in your mouth because your jaw has become unhinged for too long.


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