The Chase
I enjoy storms. And there’s nothing like the beauty and fury of supercell storms on the Great Plains in the Spring and early Summer.
Last May, I joined Silver Lining Tours on a weeklong photography-oriented tour. They are experts in knowing where to find storms and how to approach them safely. We drove over 3,000 miles through four states during the weeklong tour.
On May 24, we were in Kansas chasing a storm. While it looked promising, it never started spinning enough to become a tornado threat. And it never produced much cloud-to-ground lightning.
At 7:11 PM near Deerfield, Kansas we spotted a grain elevator and started shouting “Photo op!”
Our driver pulled off the road at the location tagged in the orange ellipse at the bottom of the map below. Wolf Grain (red ellipse) looked to be a perfect subject to provide a sense of scale to the towering clouds above us.
The Shot
Landscape photography is usually a slow paced, contemplative process. That isn’t always possible with storms. You might have to “bug out” at a moment’s notice. Approaching lightning, hail, rain, high winds, and tornadoes all demand your attention.
The road leads to the updraft area of the storm. The streamers at the end of the road are rain shafts.
The entire dark cloud bank stretching across the middle is a "shelf" cloud. The interface between rising air in front of the storm and descending rain-cooled air behind the cloud line creates the shelf.
Radar indicated that large hail was headed our way. We only had two minutes to pile out of the van, compose, and take the shot. After that, we hustled back into the van and drove to a safer location.
It was a week without any pictures of beautiful, sculpted supercells or tornadoes. But it was a week of dramatic clouds over a variety of Great Plains structures. Of all the shots I took during the week, this one turned out to be a favorite.
Thanks for looking,
Chuck
P.S. I want to thank Allan Fisher, Storm Preparedness Consultant Meteorologist, and fellow Naperville Photogenesis Camera Club member for his assistance in identifying the cloud structures.