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I had a fun moment this evening when I got to present a metal print of a once-in-a-lifetime lightning photo to the mayor of Cocoa, Florida, at a city council meeting. Cocoa is a town here on the Space Coast, and it’s proud of its award-winning water tower. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as an award-winning water tower, but Cocoa’s was named 2015 Tank of the Year. It’s also been a frequent target of my photography efforts. I’ve nabbed a few lightning photos with it over time, but on Sept. 28, I hit the jackpot. I snapped multiple photos of the tower with extremely close cloud-to-ground lightning bolts. Though I got multiple shots, each photo is just ONE exposure, of one flash.

I have just made the most spectacular photo (above) and an additional shot available in my online photo gallery for print orders. Both are available in various formats, including canvas, metal and fine art prints.

Photo links: Photo 1 | Photo 2

 
This was one of those spontaneous “gentlemen’s chases” (or lady’s chase) just a few minutes from home on Florida’s Space Coast that resulted in one of the most spectacular lightning photos I’ve ever captured.

A small, isolated storm was headed toward Cocoa, Florida, on September 28, 2016, not far from my home. At first I thought I might try to intercept it along the water somewhere, but I realized this might be the chance to get lightning with the Cocoa water tower (I’d tried before). I stopped at one location but was frustrated by the trees, so I thought I’d take a chance and see if the storm would cooperate and drop lightning close enough to the tower that I could capture it if I was right across the street.

For a while, it seemed the storm was dying, and then it pulsed up with stunning results. I posted the most insane of these lightning flashes on Facebook, and it went viral, with a few of the usual “this is Photoshopped” skeptics chiming in. The only “Photoshopping” on that photo was the kind of minimal adjustments to contrast and reduction of highlights that photographers do on all photos. The exposure was nearly perfect, so I made minimal adjustments later (bringing down the slight overexposure of the bright-white water tower) and trimmed a thin slice off the right edge to achieve 4×5 dimensions. Settings: ISO 100, f/11, 11 seconds.

In fact, this is one of the more perfect lightning exposures I’ve ever achieved. Luck, experience, patience and perseverance all played a role. You can read about how the chase and photos evolved in the captions below, with settings.

Roll over each image to see the caption, or click on one to see a slide show with larger photos. Interested in prints? Learn more.

 
On May 21, Kathy Velasquez and I focused our chase target to Leoti, Kansas, along with legions of other chasers, and were treated to a stunning supercell with amazing structure.

We barely saw the first tornado and missed the others but chose to hang back and appreciate this rare beauty of a storm rather than tangle with the rain. This supercell ranks among my favorite storms of all time for its beauty.

 

Roll over each image to see the caption, or click on one to see a slide show with larger photos.

 
Sometimes, as a storm chaser, I take a chance on a marginal forecast rather than chase a higher likelihood of severe storms in a place I don’t want to chase.

On May 11, I targeted an area with decent upper-level winds and dewpoints – where Colorado meets the Oklahoma Panhandle and the northern Texas Panhandle. I refined the target to a storm coming out of New Mexico, and after driving in a rather frustrating loop (road network issues), I ended up in front of a storm coming out of Clayton, New Mexico, that just got prettier and stronger until it ended up being warned as severe.

This storm and its sister storm had incredible lightning that I chased all the way back to Amarillo.

Roll over each image to see the caption, or click on one to see a slide show with larger photos.

Our version of big waves probably wouldn’t lure Laird Hamilton, but for Florida, today’s waves were pretty impressive. Offshore Hurricane Joaquin was pumping them up, and the surfers came out in droves to Cocoa Beach and “Second Light,” at Patrick Air Force Base. See my photos from today here.

Meanwhile, summer is over, with few nighttime lightning storms for me to shoot here on the east coast. Nonetheless, I’ve pulled together the sparkling scraps from the summer, and you can find them here. The quest continues to get the perfect lightning shot at Port Canaveral’s Exploration Tower, but I got a couple that were pretty.

And now, the 90-degree days of autumn continue! Enjoy!

For more storm photos and videos from this year, including twisters from Tornado Alley, see the 2015 storm galleries.

 

Lightning was sparse over the summer of 2015 – or should I say photographable lightning at night in east-central Florida was sparse. Other areas seemed to light up nightly.

In this post are gathered stormy scraps from this summer, including a few lightning shots that helped make the season palatable.

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

It was a beautiful evening, with the full moon rising over the ocean and storms heading out to sea.  I set up the camera to shoot automatically while chatting with friends at one of their oceanfront condos (man, I’d love to have that perch for photography all the time!).  The bad thing about that is, when the rain started spitting again, I wasn’t there to wipe off the lens. So while I got a handful of cool shots with lightning, the ones with raindrops were pretty much unlovable. I did my best to repair them, but after a while, they start to look like Impressionist paintings. (Maybe that’s not all bad.)

All that said, the photo above was taken after I’d wiped off the lens. The contrast wasn’t high, as the bolt lit up the cloud/precipitation in the air, and the ocean was pretty dark, but I like the subtlety. Also, I wanted to post it here because the social media outlets, like Facebook and Twitter, always make photos with this kind of subtle light look like crap. I realize the services are compressing them, but it still makes me a bit frustrated.

Want to see more storm photos from this year, including tornadoes? Check out the storm reports – as always, a work in progress.

 
On May 15, I chased with Mark Robinson, Jaclyn Whittal, Michel Millaire, Matt Grinter, Brad and Dayna Rousseau, Dave Lewison, Scott McPartland and Stephen Barabas. We began the chase on storms in southwest Nebraska, just north of the Colorado line.

While I got some beautiful lightning and enjoyed the chase, the trip “home” to the hotel ended in disaster when I hit a deer in the Middle of Nowhere, Nebraska. It’s a long story, but after the nightmare of dealing with AAA (who eventually lost my car – yeah, I found it again), the police and the crazy scene, I got to a hotel in the wee hours with the help of friends (special thanks to Dan Shaw and Greg Ansel), and my car went into a shop the next day in North Platte. After we found it. Seriously, it’s a long story.

To top things off, I had a horrible cold and spent the weekend worried my car would be totaled. It wasn’t, but it had to be held hostage for repairs. A rental car got me back on the road.

That said, the pictures are nice. Roll over each image to see the caption, or click on one to see a slide show with larger photos.

 
On May 9, I chased storms on and off with Mark Robinson, Jaclyn Whittal, Michel Millaire, Matt Grinter and Brad and Dayna Rousseau. We targeted southwest Kansas and ended up in the Oklahoma Panhandle, witnessing beautiful storms along the way.

Roll over each image to see the caption, or click on one to see a slide show with larger photos.

 

I’m busy trying to meet several work deadlines before heading out west to Tornado Alley, but the east coast of Florida has provided some welcome distractions for a storm chaser this month. We’ve had shelf clouds and lightning, though the lightning was a bit sparse. Let’s just say I spent several hours clicking the shutter for the little bit I got.

Still, there’s nothing more therapeutic than standing by the ocean, listening to the waves and thunder, while trying to capture a lightning bolt with my camera. Check out all the April storm photos below.

Stay tuned – the Tornado Alley chase is coming soon!

Roll over each image to see the caption, or click on one to see a slide show with larger photos.