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I recently took a week to visit family and shoot portrait sessions in Pennsylvania. A wonderful bonus was a road trip through west-central Pennsylvania in quest of covered bridges, many of which I saw in Somerset County. It’s funny, the romantic notions we have of covered bridges, but this was no Bridges of Somerset County romance novel. Many of the bridges are no longer in regular use; they sit parallel to the main road’s bridges, or are even blocked off in historical parks. But with a little imagination, you can frame them nicely and transport yourself in time. So much of photography is illusion – or call it artistic choice, if you like. I chose to go for a saturated look that brought out the middling fall colors. I love catching the flashy foliage as the trees throw their annual party before going to sleep for the winter, as much as I love coming home to the perpetual green of Florida.

I also took a few shots of a sunflower field in Lancaster County – home of so many Amish buggies, rolling farms, and fruit stands overflowing with pumpkins. Sunflowers always make me think of Kansas, now that storm chasing is in my blood. Seeing them in full bloom in Kansas is something I haven’t yet experienced, since I live in Florida; that’s a trip I look forward to. See more covered bridges and sunflowers here.

I never want to say I’m blocked as a writer. That’s like saying I’m not a professional. For years, I wrote for newspapers and churned out story after story, and I still do that kind of work, sometimes. It’s not that I didn’t care about the words; I did, but I had deadlines, and I had to work fast.

When you’re writing a novel, and you’ve set your own deadlines, it’s not as easy to be disciplined. Still, when I’m in the groove, I can write almost as fast as I wrote newspaper articles. Except … sometimes, there’s a block. A rock in the road. And the story keeps running into it. I recently spent a while looking at a rock like that. I’m working on the sequel to Funnel Vision, and though I have a pretty thorough outline, there was a spot in the middle that didn’t have a way through. Because a story can’t just jump from one mile to the next without a reason, just as it can’t creep toward something and never get there (unless, perhaps, that’s the intention, a la Samuel Beckett).

I think it took a weekend away, looking at the changing light on the ocean and the shifting shadows of the palm trees, to realize I’d just have to walk around the rock and see where it took me. I needed to see it from the other side and let the characters choose a new path. And then the story started to flow again.

Remember that old “Saturday Night Live” skit in which Stephen King is being interviewed, typing the entire time, and for one second says he has writer’s block – then keeps on writing? It was pretty funny, knowing how prolific he is, but that state of dedication is enviable. If you’ve read his memoir, you know it didn’t come easy. (And all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.)

Everyone has a different way of writing, and I think I’m learning that my characters feel imprisoned in too much premeditated structure, as do I. So I’m going to try to build my outlines out of balsa wood instead of steel and see what happens … and keep an eye on how the shadows change.

The Aug. 15 lightning show in Brevard County, Florida, wasn’t (for me) easy to catch, but I got a few photos that may be of academic interest, if not as artistic as I’d like. There were technical challenges, one being that most of the bolts were embedded in rain. Another was that during the ten minutes they were really good, I was driving and stuck at Cocoa’s many stubborn traffic lights. Nonetheless, you can find the photos here. Above is one of the better ones.

I’ve been longing for nighttime lightning, as I always do during Florida’s summers. I want to photograph it, of course, but there’s just not as much of it as you might think. Often, storms fire early and shoot off outflow boundaries, sometimes in the form of sweeping shelf clouds like this one in Rockledge on Wednesday. I’m still hoping for more!

Meanwhile, the tropics are active. While hurricanes are fascinating, mostly, I think they’re more pain than pleasure. They present fewer photographic opportunities, unless you’re on the International Space Station, and they cause a lot of misery. However, if you’re into the violence of nature, as many storm chasers are, it’s hard to resist them. I’d rather chase tornadoes any day.

Florida has afforded a fair number of photo opportunities since I’ve been back from what I consider my real storm-chasing trip, the one to Tornado Alley. I shouldn’t be a storm snob, but the Plains storms have such power and magnificence, it’s hard for Florida’s summer thunderstorms to compete. Still, Florida is king of the shelf clouds, and it’s tops nationally in lightning (though not always at night, when I prefer to shoot it). And Wednesday, I caught a very pretty shelf cloud in Brevard County, Florida, as it came over the Indian River Lagoon. One result was the panorama above; the other is this video, which includes time-lapsed footage. Adjust the settings (via the gear symbol) to see it in HD. See more images from that day.

It’s always difficult adjusting to the routine of regular life when I get off the road. Storm chasing embodies freedom for me – the ability to go wherever I wish, according to nature’s whims, to follow the weather. I am totally immersed in my passion. I love being at home, too, but my attentions are fragmented. I have to work to earn a living, acknowledge bills and deal with the drudgery that comes from basic life maintenance. (Though laundry follows me even on the road.) At least Florida offers storms in the summer, although the photo opportunities are more scant than you might think, especially for lightning.

Last night, I headed out in hopes of catching some lightning in a severe storm that was approaching the east-central coast. Most of the bolts seemed buried in rain, and I was preparing myself for disappointment. I decided to give it a few more minutes in case it went into anvil-crawler mode, and I was pleasantly surprised by a handful of spectacular crawlers. See all the photos here. I recommend clicking on the thumbnails and viewing the large images as a slide show so you can see the detail in the bolts.

In the meantime, I’ve updated my 2012 chase reports and photos from Tornado Alley, but I still have a couple of videos to add. In between the obligations of reality, that is.

I’ve done almost nothing but drive for the past two days – I’ve made it from Rockledge, Florida, to North Platte, Nebraska. That’s more than 1700 miles. And Tuesday, it looks like I’m headed into the Dakotas for a slight chance of severe storms … but I’m not sure if it’ll be North or South Dakota. It will depend on my sleep, my driving, and of course, my forecast in the morning.

Meanwhile, here’s a quick look at a photo from Sunday. I stopped for several minutes outside Jeanette, Arkansas, and took some lightning photos. I’ll post more later. This is always the problem with all the driving while storm chasing – it’s hard to squeeze in the Internet updates!

I’m tired … it’s late … and I have to get my sleep schedule turned around before my epic drive to Tornado Alley in a couple of days. But I had to post images and video from Thursday’s chase of a beautiful severe storm in Brevard County, Florida. Find the photos and video here.

I chased storms near home in Brevard County, Florida, on Monday. It was a good way to work out my gear, in hopes that I might actually have a chance to use it in Tornado Alley soon. The pattern in the Plains is not conducive to widespread severe weather, and it appears conditions will remain that way for a while. So … I chased lightning storms, and mostly messy storms, around the Space Coast. There was one nice storm in West Melbourne that had surprisingly interesting structure for a while, along with intense lightning. I’ve featured that storm in a video on a page with photos on my sister site, SkyDiary.com, which is storm-chasing central. See the chase account here.

I’m in the mood to play with photos, since I’m anticipating my upcoming storm-chasing safari. While I await a better weather pattern, I’m keeping occupied with photo opps at home in Florida, like this pretty sunset Sunday amid dying storms over the St. Johns River. We desperately need any rain we can get, and I’m hoping Monday will be more productive.

But since it was beautiful for most of Sunday, we went to a local car show with friends. Vintage Kulture’s event in Cocoa Village was a feast for the eyes and imagination. I love shooting the retro-futuristic lines of these cars and giving them even more vintage flavor in processing.