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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.

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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.

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Our town is so small, it usually has joint events with the town next door. In July, it’s fireworks. In December, it’s parades, on land and on the water. Friday night it was the Rockledge-Cocoa (or Cocoa-Rockledge) Christmas boat parade, and it was kind of adorable.

If you’re not familiar with this phenomenon, people dress up their boats with lights and inflatable decor (picture giant polar bears) and set out on the Indian River Lagoon for an extremely short trip between Rockledge and Cocoa, Florida. Other towns have this, too – I once had the experience of riding on a boat in the Cocoa Beach boat parade, and while it was interesting, it was longer than most operas. It’s fine from the shore, where everyone was having parties, but on a boat, especially a boat without a bathroom, it can feel rather endless.

But I digress. The Rockledge-Cocoa parade is not endless. It’s short and sweet. In Rockledge, several people gathered at the municipal dock on the historic river road next to the Indian River Lagoon to watch. Here are a few photos I snapped of the experience.

I didn’t get a lot of sleep this past week, partly because of a trio of night rocket launches from here on Florida’s Space Coast. Technically, while one was a SpaceX launch a week ago just after sunset, the other two were in the wee hours. Those are the ones that killed my sleep schedule, but it’s hard to resist a chance to nab streak shots.

All of these were shot at ISO 100 and f/18 on my Nikon 500. The time varied based on how long I decided to keep the shutter open; I judge that on the fly and try not to let the rocket escape my frame (usually). A tripod is essential for this kind of shot. For the first and third shots, I used my 12-24mm lens (set at 12mm). For the fog shot, I used my 10.5mm fisheye in an attempt to catch the reflection of the rocket’s ascent. This doesn’t always work, but it helps if the lagoon is still or if you’re on a wet beach.

It was a beautiful night for a rocket launch this evening in Cocoa, Florida, where I set up a Nikon and a GoPro to capture the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. This was a special mission – Inspiration4, the first private human spaceflight mission to orbit. Commissioned by Shift4 Payments CEO Jared Isaacman, it aims to raise awareness for the St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. And also, no doubt, to mount a landmark adventure.

The rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 8:02 p.m. EDT. A few clouds made the launch even more beautiful as the rocket lit them during its ascent, and then the sun caught the vehicle and its contrail, creating the “jellyfish” effect one often sees just after sunset or just before dawn. The SpaceX launches are always visually interesting at night for their colorful effects during the journey, especially when captured with a zoom lens, as in this post.

Tonight, I used purely a wide angle lens on the Nikon D7100, my trusty 12-24mm, and I stacked a handful of images to create the still photo. I probably could’ve gotten a cool image just by leaving the shutter open, but I wanted to try it this way. I set the GoPro to shoot in “nightlapse” mode to produce the video.

 

Almost every year, I try to capture the blossoming of night-blooming cereus flowers in a timelapse video. These cactus vines produce dinner-plate-size flowers in late spring where I live — central Florida — and each flower blooms just once. The aromatic flower begins to open at sunset and closes at dawn.

Some nights, several flowers bloom at once, making a spectacular display. The cactus vine grows up one of our palm trees, and I’m also trying to get it started on our oak after seeing pictures of an oak in Orlando draped with the giant flowers.

For the timelapse this year, I used a GoPro Hero 8 in timelapse mode. I lit the flowers with a simple LED worklight.

On some chases, you get the bear. And on other chases, the bear gets you.

You could say Alethea Kontis and I got the bear on May 30 as we chased in New Mexico with Dave Lewison and Scott McPartland. We were northeast of Clayton, and the guys got ahead of us as I spotted a critter climbing on a power pole. It appeared to be a young bear, and despite its blond hair, a young black bear. For safety, we stayed in the car as we stopped and filmed the bear for a few minutes. And because we were in the car, I tried to use my phone to film it, so my pictures kind of stink. (Theme of the day.)

By the time we decided to move on, we damn near missed the tornado. So in this sense, the bear kind of got us.

Scott and Dave had stayed with the storm, watching it develop. We pulled up on a dirt road next to them just as they were about to move closer to the developing tornado. We quickly turned around and resumed heading north. We spotted the fleeting tornado, and I got only a glimpse on my wide-angle GoPro dash cam, resulting in – yes – another crappy image when I cropped it later. And unfortunately, we missed better tornadoes that occurred to our east that we were simply unreachable once we got into this area of almost no roads.

We got almost under the rotation, amid ground-scraping clouds and under the threat of hail, which we escaped by heading east. After that, the day was pretty much a car wash. But it was interesting. I’d never seen a bear while chasing storms before!

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There’s nothing like waking up in Roswell, New Mexico, and not having time to enjoy all the UFO-related tourist traps. At least Alethea Kontis and I had done so before … but this morning of May 29, we had to get on the road and get up to southeast Colorado to reach our chase target. We were in good company, as a flotilla of other storm chasers also thronged the roads once we got there.

We caravanned with Scott McPartland and Dave Lewison, in Scott’s Xterra, which sports shields to keep out hail, as well as Jason Persoff, whose car has a number of honorable hail dents. Jason was one of the lucky chasers on the Campo, Colorado, tornado in 2010, and our target was in the same area in what he recognized as similar conditions.

 
We ended up north and west of Campo, southwest of Pritchett, keeping an eye on storms that showed little organization. But the models called for better dewpoints to accompany moisture-transporting winds from the south, and when they arrived – bingo! The storm we were watching evolved quickly into a rotating supercell.

 

A wall cloud followed, then a big cone tornado as rain wrapped around the mesocyclone. Yes, it was another “maybenado” of 2021, except enhanced images and other chasers’ reports confirm that we did indeed see a tornado. Hey, even if it was in the murk, I’ll take it.

As we tried to keep up with the storm, we bounced on a dusty gravel road through Colorado canyons, headed south across the Oklahoma border. This is a hilly area, and Alethea and I found a couple of high spots to watch inflow streaming into the storm, which produced one apparent wall cloud after another. In spite of radar showing rotation in just the right spot, and suggestive, ground-scraping cloud features, we saw no other tornadoes.

We all met up on the road again as darkness fell. We stopped on the north side of Boise City, Oklahoma, at the Cimarron Heritage Center, which has a fantastic big dinosaur sculpture that was the perfect foreground for lightning. After fun photography (and a very cool timelapse – check out the video), we ran into other chasers in town, compared notes, and wrapped up what was a really fun chase.

In spite of maybe-nadoes.

 

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How perfect to chase a supercell that looked like an alien invader in Roswell, New Mexico.

On May 28, Alethea Kontis and I hit the road in Childress, Texas, with Jason Persoff, Dave Lewison and Scott McPartland. Our first target was the Midland area, but it looked as if the target was shifting south into tough chase territory (rugged hills). And even if Midland had remained the most likely target, the frustrating construction nightmare had us changing direction and heading for eastern New Mexico.

This choice illustrates a typical chaser’s dilemma: Go for the more likely tornado, which may not be that easy to catch or see if it happens because of territory or congestion, or chase the more visible, accessible storms. These days, with so many chasers on the road, I really like secondary targets. And even though we didn’t see a tornado, I am thrilled with what we saw in New Mexico.

 

We were already behind the eight-ball by the time we neared Roswell, with ongoing rotating storms emerging from the higher elevations. Yet we were greeted by an eerie sight – blowing dust, gustnadoes from a dying storm to the north, strange green light and a beast of a supercell in front of us. It was like driving into a sci-fi movie.

 

The storm was full of hail, and Scott and Dave went ahead in their well-shielded car as we dropped south. Except a big hailstone bounced off their hail shield and took out a side mirror. The rest of us hung back but still got into some fun smaller hail and took photos of baseball-size hailstones we found by the side of the road. The trees in that area were shredded by the bombardment.

 

Finally, we saw multiple funnel clouds and were treated to an insanely orange sunset and a double rainbow. The chase concluded with beautiful lightning amid the mammatus at Artesia. And Alethea and I made one more stop on our way back to Roswell for the night, capturing spectacular stars above the retreating lightning storms.

Not bad for a roundabout 559-mile chase.

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