Colorado Captures

Sure I’ve got quite a passion for landscapes but I’ve been watching my storm-chasing buddies over the past few years with great interest. So with some training and a few gadgets, I joined my friends out on the eastern plains of Colorado chasing big storm cells. I’ll have to say it was pretty exciting!

Electric Purple Crayons

I’d been looking for my chance to capture some really cool lightning and this night of storm chasing on the eastern plains finally paid off. I didn’t just find lightning, I found crazy lightning! And I was really impressed with how much purple came straight out of the camera. This big cell was moving east into Nebraska (away from me) as I got this 30 second long exposure from a little farm near Holyoke, Colorado.

Knowing I had some interest in storm chasing, I joined my buddies at ChaserCon a while ago which is a convention of trained storm chasers – some seen on the Discovery Channel. I got some weather spotter training that really opened my eyes to the activity we often see in the summer months on the Eastern Plains of Colorado. And I’m sure glad I spent the time getting trained because it really helps to know how to do it safely.

Shortly after the training, I lined up my smartphone with some good weather applications that really helped to identify where the storms were most intense and to give a clue as to what they might do next. Of course, the predicting part is the real challenge. Even still, applications that show radar and lightning strikes in real-time (or close to it) were very helpful.

I also picked up something called a lightning trigger that uses a light sensor to detect a flash of light. It then tells the camera to fire a shot. I thought it would be helpful, but in this case, there was such an incredible quantity of lightning flashes coming from this giant cell, it really wasn’t needed.

In the end, I found an approach to shooting the lightning where I stayed away from the leading edge of a storm and all the intense parts like the hail and extreme wind. Instead, I found myself following a cell. As a result, life was much more peaceful. Instead of ending my photo session with nearby lightning strikes, wind, and hail, I just drove up behind it until it looked good and then shot this image while it slowly move farther away. I was thrilled to be able to get such a cool shot of all the lightning, but I really liked that I wasn’t setting myself up to get lit up too!