A few South Dakota oldies

Due to the lack of anything photogenic around here lately I've been forced to dig into the archives for something new to toy around with. Last night I pulled out a few photos that I never actually posted from the May 22 2010 Bowdle South Dakota event. Even though this date produced a ton of quality storm imagery for me, it still haunts me as I missed the 30 minutes or so when the storm produced the massive Bowdle EF4 tornado. Either way, here are a few images from before and after that tornado.

There will also be a few somewhat big changes coming to the site in a week or so. Nothing drastic I suppose, but it's something anyway.

This is right as the initial EF2 tornado wound down, and the storm went haywire and the massive EF4 tornado began to spin up. A small funnel cloud is visible amongst the ragged violently rotating storm base.

There may be more than one tornado on-going at the moment that this photo was taken, hidden behind the rain. At this point I had missed an incredible tornado, and also done damage to my vehicle by hitting a pheasant at 65 mph, so I was in damage control mode and taking the path of least resistance by hanging back and shooting structure photos of the storm.

On the way back to the motel that I had reserved in Sioux City, SD I kept looking up at these mammatus near Aberdeen, SD, in a sour mood not wanting to make any more stops before eventually convincing myself that I would regret not popping off at least a couple of photos.

Fire in the sky

No, not the aurora kind that I had hoped for, but in waiting I did manage to have some fun with the approaching cirrus deck. The first shot is facing toward the massive glow in the eastern sky that the city of Chicago and surrounding suburbs creates. Then we swing around to the west where the setting sun is still casting it's last gasps of twilight. The aurora borealis never did make an appearance before clouds completely moved in. Timing on this week's CME was poor as it arrived around 9 AM this morning and had essentially spent itself by the time the sun set this evening. Next time!

WX in Motion 2011 - Weather Time Lapse

I spent a little bit of time last weekend throwing this little time lapse video together. I didn't make a DVD this fall as I normally would, so I needed to do something with all of the B-roll time lapse footage that I shot during the summer and threw it in with some overplayed clips from 2007-2010.

Full moon

Went out and took advantage of the full moon and a fairly mild night before the snow arrived earlier this week.

We're getting dumped on pretty good right now for our first legitimate snow event of the winter. I called for about five inches yesterday, and right now I'd put us at about three. It's nice that the first event waited this long, for a summer lover like myself. Generally I am okay with the first snow or two, but after about a month of driving and walking around in the stuff I generally get tired of the snow being around. Given that our first decent snowfall is generally around the beginning of December, give it about a month and by early to mid January I'm generally sick of the snow. That doesn't usually work well for me given that in early January there's still at the very minimum another month of awful weather, likely two. So, we're in mid January now when I would typically already be sick of winter, however we just enjoyed a week of 50 degree weather and I'm actually sort of enjoying this first snowfall of the winter. So anyway, it all just makes the last part of winter a little easier to take.

Graffiti and Melanie

I woke up this morning and was happy to see another sun filled blue sky. I briefly mentioned the other day having made plans to do a modeling type portrait session with my friend, Melanie. We met up a little bit after the lunch hour and set out to take full advantage of another great day weather wise. I'd been brainstorming ideas the past couple of days as we made our plans to get together, and decided I wanted to go back to this area in NW Champaign with several overpasses that are covered in graffiti. I went there to shoot engagement photos for my friends last week, and thought it might be an easy place to ease myself into the idea of portrait photography. Looking at the photos you'd figure it to be a pretty sketchy area for the two of us to be out taking photos, but this is actually adjacent to a really nice park, and there was a trail where people were walking their dogs and jogging right by us. Lucky for me, the graffiti and Melanie did all the work, so my first attempt at modeling was pretty easy. Melanie is obviously a pretty girl to begin with which makes things easy, but she was picking out photo locations left and right and then striking the pose all on her own, so it's hard for me to take any of the credit on what I think what a pretty good first outing. She and I both have other ideas that we're eager to put to work in coming months too, so hopefully here's to a little variety from the wind farms and star trails as we head back toward the spring.

Here's a link to the entire flickr set.

For lack of better words...

Here are some stars.



Going to try something different. My ever so loyal friend Melanie is going to let me photograph her in a model type shoot tomorrow, somewhere. I'm not entirely sure what we'll come back with, but she's the first person I've run into that has actually been gungho about letting me experiment with her in front of the camera. Most of what few ideas I have would probably be better suited for the warm season, but she seems equally stoked so hopefully with our powers combined we won't come away empty handed. Either way, it will be above 50F and sunny, so it will be nice to spend some time outdoors.

Campus star trails

Got bored tonight and went out on the University of Illinois campus to shoot some urban star trails. I went onto the main quad, and set up facing the southern sky and Foellinger Auditorium.

Here's a link to the higher resolution flickr image.

http:http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif//farm8.staticflickr.com/7167/6626419471_b7b9c34c88_o.jpg

Social networking revisited

I've decided to start the twitter up again as a source of frequent updates during the warm season and an outlet for non-sense and the occasional astro-photography during the winter. I get a lot of requests on my person Facebook page, but deny the majority as I decided a long time ago to keep that page limited to only those I have a relationship with in the real world. I lost interest in the idea of networking when I became an anti-social jerk years ago. So, whether you're a storm chaser groupie, or just another chaser interested in networking, I can't imagine that you'd really care to see all the photos of my dinners and hear about all the Red Bull I've consumed as I make myself a candidate for a future test subject on the long-term effects of high taurine consumption. Anything weather related worth a damn would just be posted here for your blogging pleasure. That said, if you really need all the nonsense, you're welcome to follow my Twitter account now. Of all my four loyal readers, if you're not already following go ahead and do so. I'll try to make things interesting as we slowly grind toward warmer days.

http://twitter.com/#!/PStormMedia