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Hey, did you miss me?  It’s been a while since I updated my webpage but that is because I have been pretty busy working on and finishing up my company website http://www.StormChasingVideo.com  Yes it is finally done and I now have free time to get out and shoot new content and live life again.

The evening rush hour became the slush hour as lite snow fell across the Twin Cities metro area of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, MN. This video was mainly shot in the city of Bloomington, MN about a mile away from the Mall of America on Old Shakopee Road as drivers found that the slushy wet snow that was falling had turned the road into a slick mess of ice that made driving on it very dangerous. Total Run Time: 3:15

Clip 1 A white SUV wagon tries to take the corner but ends up hitting the curb on the other side of the road.

Clip 2 A driver loses control after and slides across the road as another car is driving towards him. The first car tries to speed up and you can hear the engine rev up but all he ends up doing is smashing into a telephone / street light post. The second car he was trying to avoid ends up hitting the first car.  Funny note, the guy that hit the pole, lights up a smoke right after the car crash.  All parties were ok but declined to talk to the camera.

Clip 3 Traffic with snow on slick roads

Clip 4 Police arrive at the crash scene.

Clip 5 Shot of the traffic in the heavy snow coming towards the camera

Clip 6 White SUV almost spins out of control while trying to turn left onto Old Shakopee Road.

Clip 7 Cars trying to make a turn but slide a little before being able to turn.

Clip 8 Mini Van tries to make the turn but starts to slide towards the camera before making the decision to not hit the cameraman or any other cars.

Clip 9 Another Mini Van slides to a stop before hitting the cameraman or other cars and was able to make the right turn.

Clip 10 Point of View tight shot of traffic on the interstate that was backed up.

Clip 11 – 13 Snow plows on the interstate

Hey folks,

Yes I know that I have been missing on line on my personal website for month’s but the webpage update that I have been talking about for what seems like year’s, is finally finished. 

I have finally completed the update and upgrade to the StormChasingVideo.com webpage.  Now we have just under two thousand stock footage catalogs on line and no more worrying about clients dealing with FLV format issues. 

I won’t bore you with the details about what it took to get this update finally finished after a couple of years, but the bottom line is now I’m free to get back out in the field to chase storms next spring.

But that is not the best part about the whole update and upgrade.  The part that I’m so proud of is that I never have to send out a demo video ever again to anyone because everything is on line.   That is right, on top of the major move of the couple thousand video catalogs that I had to review, encode and upload to Youtube, I also placed all the time-coded master uploads on line for clients to download.  This makes it possible that if a client see’s a video on StormChasingVideo.com that they might want for their production, they can download the time coded and water marked high quality screener to put into their editor to work on as soon as they download it. 

With so many video catalogs for clients to pick from and having everything on line so they can get a demo screener, my dream of having a one stop shop of high quality video is now a reality at http://www.StormChasingVideo.com

What is next?  Next for me is to get caught up with paperwork and get back out into the field to shoot some more great footage and also spend time with the newer crews to get out and train them in person with new ideas. 

Also we are upgrading our streaming service for next years storm chasing.  Yes, the rumor’s are true, we have HD Streaming if we need to do HD Streaming just like a virtual satellite truck.

It feel’s good to be caught up with the work.  Now I just need to get back to working on this site with new images and updates.

Below are a few of the new images of the Auroras that I shot a few weeks ago.

When you look up the definition of what the perfect fall colors viewing weekend in Minnesota, this weekend would be it. With high temperatures today and tomorrow in the low 80s and a light wind, it is the perfect time to get out and view the fall colors around the Twin Cities on this last weekend of September.

The fall colors are becoming vivid along the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, MN. The colors are intense and one needs to do is take a drive along Minnehaha Parkway in Minneapolis or Sheppard Road in Saint Paul.

In this video from along the banks of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers in Saint Paul you can see all the Oaks, Maples, Birch and various other tree’s changing colors this weekend.

There is a surprise at the end of this video. I wanted to check out one more spot and it was in the Fort Snelling State Park where the two rivers merge. That’s when I got the shot, a young buck (Deer) in the wild, and up close eating. I added those shots to the end of the video. The park rangers say not to feed them or get out of your car if they are nearby but they will come up to people in the park even though they are wild since is like a sanctuary for them in the heart of the metro area.

October is only a day away, get out and enjoy the weekend.

Clip 01 Overlooking downtown Saint Paul with fall colors in the foreground.

Clip 02 Overlooking Cathedral Hill in Saint Paul with vivid colors.

Clip 03 Rack Focus shot with red / brown oak leafs in the foreground and racks to the shot of Cathedral Hill in the background from the park outside the Science Museum of Minnesota. The Science Museum is on the north side of the Mississippi River bluffs in downtown Saint Paul, MN.

Clip 04 – 05 Ultra Wide and Medium shots of the fall colors from the upper deck of the Science Museum of Minnesota.

Clip 06 – 08 Yellow foliage with blue sky outside the Science Museum of MN.

Clip 09 Fall Colors reflecting along water on the river bluff on the south side of the Mississippi River Valley over Pickerel Lake.

Clip 10 Tighter shot of the fall colors on the south side of the river valley.

Clip 11 Pan shot of the colors along the south side of the Mississippi River valley in Saint Paul.

Clip 12 Contrast in Colors Red/Orange and Yellow, wide shot.

Clip 13 Red/Orange and Yellow, Rack Focus to Yellow in background

Clip 14 Contrasting colors with Oak and two pine trees under a perfect blue sky.

Clip 15 Colorful trees along the side of the road outside the Science Museum of MN

Clip 16 – 18 Wide, Medium and Tight of bright and vivid Maple Leafs with the blue sky sneaking in from behind the tree.

Clip 19 More vivid colors from the park outside of the Science Museum of MN

Clip 20 – 23 Wild Buck along the banks of the Mississippi River in the Fort Snelling State Park. The dear is feeding on vegetation about 20 feet away from the camera and does not seem care if we were there filming hi

I was told the other day that I have not updated my personal blog page or site in a couple months.  Well maybe because there really has not been much happening.  Yeah I had the retarded stalker that I had to file a police report on who turned out to be a youth counselor at a local christian center and church who was pissed off because we shot some news footage he didn’t like.  Oh wow, you don’t like the news and you are a “Christian” Youth Counselor, well “Forgive Me…”  Yeah, Foxtrot Delta Bravo… (Fn D Bag).

What else is going on in life since the weather is in the doldrums.  The last chase I went on was on 8/15/2012 where the lightning was pretty insane.  So it has been a month since I have picked up the camera.  Here is the video.

I did not chase the wannabe hurricane Isaac that hit late last month due to the fact that it was not even a full hurricane until it made landfall.  Also the fact that I wanted at least one good hurricane to hit the gulf coast to wash up all the left over oil pollution that sunk to the sea floor before I go down and play in the storm surge.  From the footage that I saw, I did not miss much.

Auroras, yeah I did get some sweet auroras back on July 15, 2012 that I should have posted here but again, I have been just deep in the video editing work on the Fury Project, that I have not paid much attention to my personal site.
Here is the Aurora footage. 

Well, it is almost 11 P.M and I need to wrap up and call it a night while the computers are on auto pilot uploading, encoding and archiving footage. 

My goal is for the Fury project to be finished by the end of the month.  What is the Fury project?  Tune in October 1st.   Also, if you don’t see me posting, check my twitter feed http://www.Twitter.com/WXPaparazzi to keep up with the day to day stuff.  

ahhhh, back from a dive trip and got some much needed rest and relaxation on a working vacation in Florida.  So how does a working trip equal a vacation?  Simple, 100 miles out in the middle of the gulf shooting HD video of the Coral Reefs with no cell phone or internet or anyone bugging me for a few days and I get to dive, yeah, it was a tough gig…  I’m still logging the video but here are a couple of still photos from the trip.

So, I have not just been slacking off and scuba diving, I have been working like crazy on stuff behind the scenes for the StormChasingVideo.com site upgrade with all the new stock video files. 

I have also been busy with going out and documenting the severe storms and even the latest round of solar storms that have been happening.  This morning, I was able to get this rare event on the Northeast side of Saint Cloud, MN where the sun was coming up and giving me an orange glow on the horizon while I was trying to get some photos of the planets rising.  I used my 10mm wide lens and the Auroras spiked for a couple minutes in the predawn glow with Jupiter and Venus rising in the eastern sky.

Earlier this week, the Northern Lights were more active here in Central Minnesota and I was able to get another sweet time-lapse video of them dancing across the sky on the morning of July 9th.

The auroras have not been the only story for me as the storms put on a cool looking lightning show over Minneapolis last weekend where I was able to shoot some video of the lightning over Lake Calhoun.

Well I better get back to work on the boring side of my job.  I have a bunch of paperwork and databases to review for the coming upgrades but it is all part of this fun gig I call chasing for a living.

Ok, with Facebook making my updates way too easy, I keep blowing off updating my actual website.  I do have the twitter feed on the left so I hope it has kept some people updated.

So, what the heck have I been up to over the last month? For one, been really busy working on the new website for BNVN StormChasingVideo.com and getting things up to speed now that I have some help with it.  It’s going to be pretty slick since my vision of what the ultimate stock footage site should be is finally coming true. 

I have also been dealing with Youtube Parasites.  What is a “YouTube Parasite”, it is someone that has no problem with copyright infringement and will use your work with no regard to Federal Copyright laws. 

They are using software that will record your footage from your YouTube Channel while it is playing back at high quality from YouTube to then re-upload on their YouTube Channel to gain views and collect the ad-revenue themselves.  We have shut down several YouTube channels over the last month and are always looking for more people ripping off our content.

It’s a high tech video piracy that costs a lot of good content producers a lot of money and wastes our time to enforce our own copyrights.   One of the idiots that we busted a few weeks ago was making some serious bank off of ripping off videos and re-posting them to their YouTube Channel that had over 25 Million Views.  According to one of the stats websites I used, the 25 Million Views is about $65,000.00 per year in ad-revenue that they pirated off other content producers. 

The worst part was they even tried to fight the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) requests that I sent into YouTube to remove the videos.  I was pretty pissed off about the whole deal and was booking a flight to personally go to their city and file a Federal Copyright Injunction against them and go all “Les Grossman” on them.

I was thinking of a way to make this into a national news story and I talked it over with some news producers friends of mine and that was when they said WTF?  I told them what was happening with the “YouTube Parasites” and they reminded me that the News Media is always hurting to hold on to revenue and if someone is ripping off their content and directing viewers away from their website and their on line advertisers, they want to know about it not for a story but to sue the crap out of the people ripping them off.  The next day, the idiot that was ripping me off and trying to fight the DMCA request got to deal with another “Les Grossman” from Hollywood and their channel ripping off all the video was gone.

The moral to the story is, if you are going to re-post other people’s content to YouTube, you better have some agreement in place or you will get sued if you are making money off the re-posted content.

In other news of what is happening in my life, the May 2012 storm chasing season was pretty much dead.  There where a few storms but I did not venture out to spend days on end to chase since there was nothing happening. 

I did chase on 5/5/2012,  Storm Chase from Mitchell, SD to Ward, MN/

I also chased around home on 5/18/2012 for the Stearns County, MN, Vivid Lightning and huge hail.

And of course I did the 5/20/2012 Eclipse Sunset over central Minnesota.

But the big story for me for the month of May was on 5/28/2012 Raw news footage of Sartell’s Verso paper plant fire, Sartell MN Fire.

The latest chase for me was the 6/17/2012 Minnesota Tornadic Storms Footage that I shot out by Wheaton, MN to just northwest of Montevideo, MN.  The storms were pretty cool and per SPC, the Wheaton, MN storm did have two tornadoes on it but I never saw them touch down.

Well, I have a computer to fix, paperwork to work on, a forecast for a possible storm chase later in the day, dive gear check out this week, answer a bunch of emails and a bunch of other stuff I need to find on my notes of what I have to do before next week.  

Here are some photos for the blog from the last chase.  Waiting for some fool to say it looks like Aliens are landing now. 

Brand new video from Stearns County, MN of the tornado that dropped just west of Saint Cloud and moved into the metro area.

Severe storms hit central Minnesota and super-cell thunderstorms produced several tornadoes from just south of Sauk Centre to Saint Cloud.

Video starts out with footage that Neva took in Saint Cloud, MN of a very large wall cloud over Saint Cloud, MN.  That is the first three clips in the video.

The remaining video are of the tornadoes on the ground about four miles south of Sauk Centre, MN.

Tornado watch has been issued and I’m Chasing just west of home on the first day of May and not 1000 miles away for once.  

Early this morning, Neva and I headed out to see the Auroras Borealis or Northern Lights.  We had to get out of the cloud cover and our first stop was up at Lake Osakis in Osakis, MN.  The Aurora was pretty bright but it was just a bright green arc in the sky and was not doing much.

So while the glow was cool, it just was not cutting it for what we were looking for in the photography since it was just a green band in the sky.  While I know most people that have never seen the Northern Lights before would say “what the heck are you talking about, that’s looks amazing”, well I have seen better and knew the setup could look a lot more impressive.

Lucky for us the clouds started to move in and ruin the show and we were forced to move out to the west and north.  After a quick phone call to our friend Dirk in Wisconsin, he said that the only area of clear sky was up near Fergus Falls, MN.  Hearing this news made me remember the location of the windmill that I found last fall and thought maybe I could pull of the shot that I have been trying to get for the last decade of a intense Aurora Borealis on a wide angle shot with a windmill in the foreground. 

We found the location and as soon as we started to setup our camera gear, sky exploded.  How do I define “The Sky Exploded”? The image below was shot using a very wide angle 10MM camera lens and the windmill was about 25 feet in front of me.

Also I didn’t just shoot photographs, I also setup the camera to do a time-lapse video of the event.  Here is the video that has been all over CNN, The Weather Channel and ABC News this morning. 

Well, I need sleep, I stopped over at the office to get blog updated before getting some much needed sleep.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll get myself down to Nebraska to chase some tornadoes.

This weekend there was some cold core storms that caught a lot of the local chasers off guard.  Reports of weak tornadoes got everyone’s attention fast and by the time I got out the door, the storm system died off to be just a heavy rain event.

The day was not a total bust as it also was a location scouting trip for new photo sites.  This year I’m going to be looking for abandoned sites to photograph around the Midwest.   We found this old school house that was closed down in 1958.