It’s been a pretty busy couple of months and I have not been updating
my personal site often. I’ve been busy working on lots of stuff for
BNVN and helping out my friends.
Now it’s time to get caught up with my own projects. This week I’m
working on a lot of stuff at home. The garden will be big on the list
but that is just for weeding since most of it is already going string.
Things on my todo list include Tape Review, I have about 30 hours of HDV tape that I need to review,
Then major site updates with all the new stock footage will be taking place over the next few weeks.
It is interesting to see the stock footage that I shot last year.
Right now I’m watching the footage I shot last July that I forgot I even
had.
Ok, just noticed that the new chase video from the crew have not been showing up in the blog pages so I’m going to post them below. There has been a lot of stuff happening in the last few weeks and first and foremost is the new site is almost ready to go back on line for BNVN. It’s a ton of work that I have been having to take care of but it’s going to look pretty sweet when it’s all done. I’m just reviewing the info for over a 1300+ stock archive videos.
I’ve been pretty busy between the ENG video, stock website and wrapping up research on another project that I have to decide if it should go the documentary film route or make it into a script but I’m hanging in there and might get out to do some storm chasing this week. It will be great to get out from working the news desk and back into the field to shoot some news packages.
Now for the latest BNVN news footage from the crews out in the field for the last couple of weeks. This is not all the footage our news crews have shot but its some of the most WOW factor footage in the last couple of weeks that has been all over the news.
What a difference one year makes. A year ago today I woke up in Hays Kansas and was getting ready to go chasing with Chris. The weather setup was perfect and you could not ask for a better setup then what was handed to all the chasers. Even the yahoo’s did not need to follow chasers around to find the storms because it was like shooting fish in a barrel. We even met up with a cool new chaser, Brandon Clark, that we thought was a yahoo coming to bug us but turned out it was someone that really wanted to learn how to chase and stopped to ask us if he could tag along. We brought him along for the ride of his life over the next two days. Now fast forward into 2009 and were under the ridge of death. What is the ridge of death? It is a massive high pressure ridge that would normally setup in July or August that makes it pretty much impossible for supercell storms to fire. That is why it is called the Ridge Of Death, it is death to the storm chasing season. I can’t complain too much because I did meet up with Jacob and Dave last week and we did chase the one storm that defined the month of May, which was the Kirksville, MO tornado. But since then, there has not been anything worth chasing that has been more then hours drive away. But there still is some stuff to photograph like the lightning from early yesterday. Here was some cloud to cloud lightning from just north of Litchfield, MN. Time to get back to working on database stuff…
Ok, I just got home about a half hour ago and taking care of a few things like posting the video from yesterday that the BNVN team shot in north centeral Missouri. We got a lot of great footage and Tornado Tim even kept rolling as the tornado we (David, Jacob and I) were filming north of Kirksville, MO and thought we were going to get his, it changed direction and went to the southeast and hit him. The only way to describe the footage is it looks like some hurricane charley footage with debris flying.
Ok, I have been up for 46, yes 46 hours and I’m dead on my feet and need sleep so here is the link to the video.
SPC Mod Risk 5/13/2009SPC Tornado Risk for 5/13/2009 Today were off to chase. After staying up all night working on computer code for the site and being so sick of solo chasing, Three of us from the F5Chaser board, Jacob, David and I are in Iowa and heading to just north of the St. Louis, MO area to IL and maybe into SE Iowa.
This is the first time I have chased with other chasers and not driving in over 9 years. The last time I was storm chasing and riding in the back seat of a chase ride was in May of 2000 with Andy Ervin and Terry Welsh. It will be interesting today as SPC has the area in a Mod Risk for severe storms and a 10% hatched area for some strong tornadoes. Going to try and take a nap while riding in the back seat while were in route to the target area. This will be another rare event.
Today on this sixth anniversary of the Kansas Turnpike near death tornado, I was close to home trying not to get hurt again but this time it was a little more controlled. As in a controlled burn…
Today was a test chase to see how my truck was running. So far so good but I still need to bring it in to get the transmission checked out. I needed to get out of the office and do a test run chase on my gear today to work out any issues and get back into spring and summer chase mode vs. winter blizzard chase mode.
I headed up north towards the Brainerd area and Lake Mille Lacs area as the storms were firing but racing off towards Duluth. It was a cool light show but I gave up on following them as they headed towards Pine County. You can’t chase in Pine County due to all the Pine Tree’s and is just as bad as chasing in Western Wisconsin.
So I headed back for the second round of storms that was heading towards Lake Mille Lacs and just sat and waited for the light show. The storms were pretty sweet to watch but they were also very outflow dominate when they moved into the area. Outflow for those of you non weather geeks is when the storm is starting to fall apart and all the air that went up comes crashing back down. And that is when you get a wind storm / dust storm like I was in up on the north west side of lake Mille Lacs as strong winds raced across the lake and came racing onto shore and blew a ton of sand and debris around. It looked pretty cool but I could not get out and setup any cameras because they would have just been blown over.
After the wind calmed down I got out and along the side of highway 169 on the north side of town and shot some stills of the lightning. The stills are not the greatest if your looking for wicked lightning hitting the ground since the lightning was all cloud to cloud. But what is cool is that I got the heads up from Tim Marshall via Facebook that there was still ice on Lake Mille Lacs and with a thunder storm over frozen lake shore, that was going to make for some interesting shots.
It was not a impressive chase or deadly chase, it was a chase were I was able to pull off something that is almost impossible because it’s pretty rare to get lightning with snow or a huge lake like Mille Lacs that still had a lot of ice on it in, in the photographs. I know I could have done a lot better video and stills and got closer to the storm when it did have a lot of cloud to ground lightning when it was west of Brainerd but I was able to now say I photographed lightning with snow / ice covering the lake in the same shot.
Oh and before I forget, the air temp was about 70-75F outside, until I was along county road 18 at the beach on the north side of the lake. The outside air temp (OAT) was 46F as the wind raced over the near freezing water and frozen ice. That’s about a 30F temp drop in less then a couple of miles. But there were no bugs out .
Ok, I know I have been slacking with the photo updates for a while but one of the reasons was that I did not have the latest copy of Adobe Photoshop. I had a copy that was over 6 years old and was not the greatest at editing the latest digital photography. Hey, I shoot video for a living so still photography has always taken the back burner for a long time.
This weekend I found a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS3 with the training video, for sale on Craigslist that was brand new in the box for only… $189.00 Yes, $189.00. That saved me a lot of coin since Adobe CS4 is about $700 and I can upgrade for only $199. So I saved over $200 if I do upgrade to Adobe CS4. But, I will hold off on that for a while since it’s going to take me some time to learn this new software but I have been playing around with the new software and all I can say is WOW.
CS3 is a very powerful tool that I should have upgraded to a long time ago but never could justify the expense since I don’t sell a lot of still photography. Tonight I tested it out while reviewing the rest of the flooding stills from March, and again, WOW. The options that I’m now able to do with the RAW image files is insane. Oh and don’t get me started with the new photomerge options and features.
Here is an image that is really several images merged together.
The grass area on each side is the side of the road on my left and on my right and that’s a whole field in front of me from as far as the eye can see that is flooded.
I have uploaded most of the images now to the gallery
This week I have a ton of website stuff to do for BNVN but once that is done, I’m going to be using my down time between chasing this spring to get this site up to date.
Today I was out chasing grass fires but this time, they were prescribed burns. A few days ago, Bill Doms gave me the heads up about the burning that might take place and I went and scouted out the location and talked with the NWR staff. I’m glad I did because today I was able to get closer to the fires and hang out with their crews when they were along the roads setting the fires.
They pretty much gave me the play by play about what was going to happen and where the best shots would be when the fires merged together.
I do have a slight sun burn like burn from the fire as the areas I was at, the heat was pretty insane but I was always up wind so I did not get smoked out. It was pretty intense to be standing right next to the field as the fire started up and the wind started rushing into the fire from my back and it really started to create it’s own wind field. I think it would be a great meso field test for Vortex2 to put a bunch of probe cars around something like that just to watch the wind fields shift.
When I left I stopped to talk to them about the next burn and as of right now, it’s all on hold until next week if we get some preceip. The crews were putting out some hot spots as I left and I did get some funny photos of two chain saws that got stuck in a tree that they were trying to cut down to keep it from falling on the roadway.
The first image is from where I got burned just from the heat coming off the fire. I was right on the fire line as they were setting the fires and when the field when up, I was worrying about shooting video and stills and not the heat. That was until the heat started to singe the hair on my right arm…
One Man is dead and his passenger and a 22-year-old woman who is eight month pregnant is in serious condition after a major crash that involved at least a half dozen vehicles shut down 2nd Street (Highway 23) on the boarder of Saint Cloud and Waite Park, MN this afternoon.
The Minnesota State Patrol along with Stearns County Sheriffs Department and the Saint Cloud and Waite Park Police and Fire Departments were on scene for several hours investigating the accident after Timothy Richard Gilles, 22, of Waite Park, crashed into a mini van while fleeing police by driving west bound in the east bound lanes of 2nd Street.
Giles was driving the Red Jeep that is in the video and hit the Green Mini Van that caused several additional accidents as motorists tried to avoid Giles fleeing the police.
According to a report from St. Cloud police, after he crashed into the Mini Van and killed the driver, Gilles ran on foot to the south accident and was arrested after officers used a Taser on him to get him under control.
Gilles was taken to Stearns County Jail, where he is being held on a Wright County warrant as well as possible charges of fleeing an officer in a motor vehicles and criminal vehicular homicide. Gilles was wanted in Wright County on drug-related charges, for fleeing and for assault of a police officer.
Officials are withholding the identity of the victims pending notification of relatives.
UPDATE
The guy ended up getting pretty much a life sentence, 36 year’s which will mean we won’t have to see the P.O.S. walking the streets until he is almost 60 year old.
