Prairiestorm IMAGERY

Prairiestorm Media is dead. Sort of. I had been toying with dropping the 'media' tag for a while, and decided now that my actual main website had been fairly irrelevant for a while now it was a decent time to make the switch. The entire site was down for almost a month and only two people actually said anything about it to me, so I don't think anyone was missing it too much.

Anyway, PrairiestormImagery.Com it is! Everything else is essentially 100% the same. My content has been more atmospheric imagery based than anything media related for a while now, so the name needed tweaked. I made the push to be less associated with media chasers and focus more on creative ways to capture the sky that I love over the last year or two, so the change makes sense.

For what it's worth - I do need to credit my brother in all of this, Colin Davis, on the name change idea. I was struggling with what to actually change it to... Prairiestorm WHAT? Imagery was so obvious that it never even dawned on me. Luckily he's around for some of those common sense moments.

To celebrate the change, here are a couple photos from last week. I went out to time lapse what I figured would be a decent sunset, and wound up stalking a convective snow shower across the county during my favorite hour of twilight after the sun had set.

Aurora and afternoon time lapse

I started the afternoon driving around aimlessly looking for a place to test out my new intervalometer, so I can start time lapsing like an adult. I wound up driving to a new addition to the Mendota Hills wind farm, about 20 minutes away from DeKalb. The hard part about time lapsing with wind turbines is that it's hard to get the blades to not look ridiculous turning and twitching at weird rates. Since this is a new addition the turbines aren't active yet so they just glide in the wind. Unfortunately even with a specific times interval between shots they still managed to turn and glide at random intervals stopping and starting again.

At they very least it was cool to see the dramatic directional shear in the atmosphere that afternoon as the low level clouds streamed out of the northeast, with upper level clouds shooting from west to east.

Later that evening while hanging with some friends I happened to check facebook and see that Chris Allington was reporting visible aurora down to the Nebraska and South Dakota border. Up here in northern Illinois that isn't a whole lot further north. Actually now that I finally look at a map, that's pretty dead on as far as latitude is concerned. You see, this is exactly why I can't bring myself to give up facebook. I go through spurts of being tired of it and think that I don't actually need it, and should get rid of it altogether. But for random updates of cool things in the sky that I wouldn't otherwise be aware of at times like this, I just can't do it. You know what's even funnier about last night, is that I woke up in a really weird mood yesterday that I could only describe as violently strong cabin fever. I woke up and immediately needed to leave the house and this area altogether. I began brain storming where within a couple of hours driving I could go that would be a change of scenery. Around here, a couple hours of driving will generally put you somewhere that looks just like the place that you started out. I tossed around driving to Starved Rock and doing some time lapse down there... then I was very close to driving up to the cabin in Wisconsin and visiting the lake and just doing night time lapses up there. Had I done that I would have been in great position, and already been photographing when the aurora display appeared. Ah well.

By the time I was alerted, grabbed the cameras and headed back out, the display was down to a faint green band on the horizon.



Funny story while out waiting on the aurora to potentially flare back up by myself. I generally don't spook at all even while out in the middle of the night by myself. I'm not sure if I'm just used to it or not. Either way, I get out of my car and the power lines are making this eerie buzzing noise. I shrugged it off and got the camera out and started shooting anyway. Then I heard two packs of coyotes start yelping on either side of me, and then the farm dog that is barking at the farm about half a mile up the road starts growling and snarling as if spooked/attacked. I paused for a moment to listen to my surroundings, but ultimately decided to hold my ground and continue shooting. Anyway, I just figure if that didn't send me running back to the car then I'm pretty sure not a lot will.

Of course once I start heading off from that spot, what is obviously a local county deputy pulled in behind me and quickly pulled me over. I didn't have my wallet on me because I had run out of the house so quickly to take photos, and when I told him that he replied with "take photos??". I told him that yes, the aurora was visible earlier and that my camera was in my backseat if he wanted to check. What was funny was immediately after that he asked if I was going to school for meteorology here. Not entirely sure how he gathered that up.

Reflections countdown... bat in CD's house

Last February I counted down the days until March 1st by posting one overlooked photo each day. Most in the weather community are aware by now that the world of storm chasing lost an amazing person on Saturday evening, when Andy Gabrielson was killed in a head on collision on the Oklahoma Turnpike. When I first read the text message informing me that he had been killed I had the initial moment of "no, that certainly can't be right." followed by a huge wave of sadness upon realizing that the dude really was gone, and how different things would be this spring. I began texting one of my closest friends in storm chasing, and really more of a brother, Colin Davis, about the situation. Ultimately, what the accident made me do was spend the rest of the night reflecting on all the great times I spent with my friends while on the chase. Every day really is a miracle, and you should take advantage of every moment that you get to spend with your loved ones.

I thought an interesting way to expand on the entire reflection idea was to actually go back and write about some of these more memorable moments. So, for every day until we finally hit March, I'll be posting a stupid little story that has stuck with me over the years. Essentially I'm telling you to enjoy reading three weeks worth of inside jokes.

On August 17 2004, I rode along with Colin Davis, Scott Kampas, and Dennis DeBourbon on a marginal day in NW Illinois. We were almost suckered into Iowa but held local and eventually chased a couple of supercells that produced decent lowerings but never came overly close to producing a tornado. After dark, more thunderstorms began popping up so once we returned to Colin's place in Canton we got the cameras back out to film the light show. We were informed upon heading into the house that a bat had entered the place. This was the second bat in a week for them, actually. I of course, got the camera back out and began filming the bat swooping around the kitchen before it bolted for the doorway I was standing in and put me on my back. Colin was standing in the next doorway and had the bat swoop around him a couple of times before flying up the stairs to the second floor.

After crouching on the floor with the bat flying laps for another minute or so the bat finally flew into the bathroom where Colin was able to trap it. One of my all-time favorite dialogue exchanges happens now between Colin and Denny. Dennis was rambling about needing to come up with a plan and that we were just moving it around the house. He began telling us to get a battle plan or let us play with it all night, and then replied with "because I don't like bats" when asked why he doesn't help with the plan. Colin then mumbles something else back about him just letting us work on it, before getting "Oh yeah, sounds like you've got a great plan" from Denny, to which he replies "Oh yeah, better than yours, 'I don't like bats!'" I wish I had the video available on a format where I could throw it online or something, because I know the 'you had to be there' aspect of the story doesn't help, and me conveying it thru text isn't helping any.

Eventually, we were able to get the bathroom window open and coaxed it to fly out while I filmed from behind the toilet.

Anyway, I can already tell that this idea is going to be a lot of me laughing as I type old stories, while you decide to stop reading this blog until I get back to posting legitimate storm chasing posts.

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