It’s time for Storm Chasing 2022! Even if we missed all the amazing storms at the end of April and the very start of May.

Alethea Kontis and I took a couple of days to travel out to Tornado Alley from Florida – realizing halfway through the journey that the weather pattern had changed from promising for storms to a much more challenging one.

We decided to press on anyway since hope springs eternal and all of that.

With occasional stops for food and gas, we drove about 1547 miles in the first two days. Our plan is to pursue photography and writing when the storms aren’t cooperating.

Here’s a video of us crossing the Mississippi in Arkansas – the official entry into the West.

I’m literally on the eve of heading to Tornado Alley for the annual storm chasing trip, which means I dropped my Honda CR-V at the dealership for an oil change. Hubby picked me up, and I immediately saw that the fast-growing cumulus tower I’d been watching had something under it – a funnel cloud! The late, great chaser Jim Leonard always said to look for waterspouts under such clouds.

The funnel, which I first saw at 11:10 a.m., persisted, proving itself a legitimate funnel. But was it a tornado? Or perhaps a waterspout? We were in Cocoa, Florida, driving east toward the Indian River Lagoon. When we finally got through all the traffic and trees and stores to the riverbank, the funnel was in the last moments of roping out.

Later, the National Weather Service office in Melbourne confirmed they had a report of a waterspout by the 528 causeway. So it did “touch down,” but not on land. That said, it looked tornadic to me. My chaser friends say I should count it as this season’s first tornado.

Regardless of what you call it, this was a pretty rare sight for this part of Florida. It didn’t look like much on radar, but the funnel just proves that surprises happen all the time. Here’s the video.

All of a sudden I’m caught in a whirlwind of preparations for storm chasing and probably leaving much earlier than I’d thought. Alethea Kontis and I will discuss our options and may be hitting the road later this week.

Work obligations have prevented me from leaving Florida so far this year. It’s always hard to miss big events like the mind-blowing Andover, Kansas, tornado, but that’s the way it works when you don’t live in Tornado Alley and can’t chase every day. And the thing a lot of people don’t understand about storm chasing is that even if you ARE out on a particular day, there’s an excellent chance you won’t see the “storm of the day.” There are a million variables, and luck plays as much of a role as skill.

Believe me, I could fill a book with missed opportunities and bad choices. Sometimes even when you think you’ve made a great choice, ten minutes later you see someone else’s video of the same tornado and want to cry because you weren’t in the same position. The healthiest thing to do is not worry so much about it … but we can’t help a little comparisonitis.

Anyway, I’m testing and preparing gear and sorting out equipment that hasn’t been used for some time. I’m also testing the only new purchase I allowed myself for this year’s chase – a GoPro Hero 10. This video is a timelapse filmed in “night lapse” mode with the Hero 10. I had a lot of luck with beautiful lightning night lapses like the one in this video, filmed on a Hero 8, during last year’s storm chase. I also expect to use this as a dash cam.

For now, here’s the video of night falling at Port Canaveral, Florida, with swirling clouds and the colorful lights of Exploration Tower, seen reflected in the water. I had to do a little processing to minimize noise in the image. Partly I think the noise is a product of me shooting at a more zoomed-in “narrow” view because I was shooting through a deck railing and even had to crop the video a bit in the edit. My experience with GoPros is that shooting wide and cropping in later (if necessary) produces a higher-quality image. But I still think this is a very pretty and meditative little video.

See you on the road soon!

It’s been a while since I’ve been to Brevard Zoo, which gets better with every visit. The expanded monkey habitats are really fantastic, and the monkeys seem to appreciate it. Lions were waiting in the wings – well, in a cage – before going on display for the first time. And work by our friends at Sandsational Sand Sculpting was on display in the multi-sculpture exhibit Life Beneath Our Sea.

Sadly, the birds were pretty much all on lockdown as the zoo tries to prevent infection by bird flu, which is in the area. The flamingos were all together in one enclosure and easier to smell than see, but I hope these measures will keep them safe. Meanwhile, vultures and ibises crashed exhibits all over the place. Maybe not the birds one expected to see, but they were interesting!

This was also a chance to exercise the camera a bit with storm-chasing partner Alethea Kontis. We hope to head to the Plains soon.

In the meantime, here are some adorable critters.

Roll over a photo to see its caption, or click on any photo to start a slide show of larger images.

My storm-chasing partner Alethea Kontis and I had a wonderful chase expedition last year, with lots of beautiful storms, funny moments and all the things that come with an intense few weeks on the road.

There were so many beautiful storms this past year. If we get half as many, it’ll be a good year … but I always hope for more! As well as a safe and healthy trip.

We talk about last year’s adventures in this video I just posted – Chris & Alethea look back at STORM CHASING 2021! And here it is.

If you go to YouTube to see the video, please hit that subscribe button for Chris – and also subscribe to Princess Alethea’s channel!

I so appreciate the amazing support we had last year. It was so fantastic, Princess Alethea has started a gas fund for this year’s chase. Want to donate?

Thank you so much for watching and messaging us and sharing the journey!

We have a bat box in our neighborhood, at Rockledge High School, and every evening – just about the time the first star (or planet) appears in the sky – the bats plunge from their box and take flight. We certainly have plenty of mosquitoes for them to feast on this spring, especially after all the rain we’ve had over the weekend.

Tonight I shot a little video with my iPhone of hundreds of bats dropping out of the box. This is just a fraction of the bats who come out each night. The new video is above.

What? You want more bats? Here’s a video I shot in 2018 with a better quality camera.

 
My getaway weekend in Miami Beach at the 2022 Miami Rum Congress was interrupted by a wild windstorm this afternoon. As a cold front pushed a line of storms through Florida, already intense winds were whipped into a frenzy and bowled through the big tasting event at the Hilton Cabana in Miami Beach.

The rum tasting was split between two locations, one at the semi-outdoors bar adjacent to the pool and the other under a big tent on the deck on the third floor. The canopy of the tent acted like a sail, flapping wildly in the high winds as brave rum folk and hotel employees attempted to secure it.

The distillers shut down amazingly quickly and, with teamwork, eventually got the canopy off the tent frame, as you can see in this video. They reset, and the tasting resumed in a ballroom indoors. What a crazy afternoon!

When I go out to shoot a launch, I really should take everything – all the lenses. All the cameras. But sometimes, I like to travel light, even if I’m just going around the block from where I live. So today – January 31, 2022 – I took one camera with a wide-angle lens and a GoPro to shoot a SpaceX rocket launch.

The launch wasn’t very close, given I shot it from Rockledge, Florida, along the banks of the Indian River Lagoon. But today, the wide shot was pretty. The purples of twilight, with cirrus clouds catching the pink of the setting sun, offered a lovely backdrop for the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket with an Italian radar satellite.

I had a moment of regret that I didn’t have my super-big lens when the booster turned around and headed back home as the payload continued on its way. At a different time of day (or night), this “jellyfish” might have been even brighter, but it was still impressive. In my shots, it’s just a small part of the whole, but you can see the bright heat of the engines as white dots.

Nights like this make me feel like I’m living in a science-fiction movie with a spaceport just down the road. And with the number of launches scheduled for this year, we’ll be seeing a lot more sights like this one, I hope.

Several seconds after the rocket booster returned and landed at Cape Canaveral, we were rewarded with the sonic boom. They’re always satisfying, somehow – and it’s a fun moment in the video.

 
I try to put together a roundup of my favorite photos at the end of the year — video will appear separately, maybe! — and it’s always challenging to pick which ones to feature. I didn’t keep the list to a top ten, but I did keep it under twenty, in no particular order. And I’m calling this list my “favorites” instead of my “best,” because there are probably some better photos, whatever that means … and if I spend any more time looking at these and trying to whittle them down to pure gold, half of 2022 will be gone. Ahem.

Storm chasing is always my prime font of images, my biggest inspiration, and not going to the Plains in 2020 (while doing the responsible thing during the plague) really hurt. So I counted on 2021 to do a lot of soul-filling last spring, and it really delivered. Though I didn’t get much in the way of photogenic tornadoes, I had a fantastic chase with Alethea Kontis and other friends, in which we saw so many gorgeous skies and supercells that it was almost impossible for me to pick just a few photos.

I was pleased to have a few other sources of photographic delights in my own backyard. One was all the birds coming to our feeder. Another was an incredibly busy year of rocket launches from here on Florida’s Space Coast, driven by SpaceX’s ambitious schedule. I included just a few of those pictures here.

The world is in rather a sorry spot, so I turn to art and nature to get me through. Capturing moments of beauty is still a pure joy. I hope you enjoy these as much as I enjoyed taking them.

Roll over the images below to see captions, and click on any one to start a slide show of larger images.

Why yes, there was another holiday parade today between Rockledge and Cocoa, this one landlocked (see previous post for photos from the boat parade). It had all the charming elements one wants from a Christmas parade: fire trucks and miscellaneous municipal vehicles, kids marching, dancing, shouting and riding on floats, and candy thrown at spectators.

I especially enjoyed seeing my awesome in-laws riding their trikes while holding their adorable papillons. Decorated, of course – the tricycles and the dogs.

This is a short video roundup that will give you the (sweet) flavor of the event. I shot this in Cocoa Village, Florida. Happy holidays!