Category: Uncategorized

Yes I know I have fallen to the quick and easy updates on my Facebook page to update my friends with what is happening in life but I have to remember that I also have a lot of friends that are not on ‘Crackbook” and they look at this site for updates.

So what is happening?  What have a photographed in the last three weeks? What is new, fresh and exciting gossip in the Storm Chasing world?

Well first off, there are a lot of new news stories about how “Storm Chasing Is Out Of Control” because so many people are storm chasing now that it is clogging up the roadways.

Really, the road’s are full of Skywarn Spotters and Professional Videographers and Photojournalist all looking for that winning shot?  Um, no, the road’s were not full of professional chasers and Skywarn Spotters looking for the tornado to warn the public.  

In this (not so) great reporting by KSTP, http://kstp.com/news/stories/S2582204.shtml?cat=1 about the storms last Sunday in central Minnesota, they started out with a great recap of the weather by Dave Dahl, some nice chopper footage of the storms and then the story pretty much takes a nose dive from a top twenty market to something a 200 market college intern would put together.  

Not only did someone think it would be funny to shoot video of “Rainbows” over the town of ‘Gaylord” but Mitch Pitman wins the worst reporter of the year award for finding a “Storm Chaser” to interview.  The guy they found was someone named “Jim Sochko” who was called a “Storm Chaser” but when asked if he had any experience with this?  His answer was “NEVER DONE IT BEFORE. I FILLED UP THE TANK WITH FUEL AND I THOUGHT I’D GO FOR A CRUSE”.

Really, you fill up you’re gas tank and just go driving into severe weather with no clue?  Because you saw something on TV and now you are “A Storm Chaser”.  And people wonder why I don’t call myself a Storm Chaser but Weather Paparazzi. 

So for all the Emergency Managers and Law Enforcement that are pissed off because the roads are filled with “Storm Chasers” no they are not filled with chasers, their filled with locals trying to chase but without a freaking clue what they are doing just like Mr. Sochko.  I’m still shaking my head that Mitch Pitman could not find one Skywarn spotter out in the field when we met up with several people that were at the Skywarn Conference the day before in Minneapolis.

I have said it before and I will say it again, anyone can go Scuba Diving if you have the equipment but you will kill yourself if you don’t know what your doing.  The same can be said about storm chasing and anyone can Fill Up Their Tank and go.  I am a trained advanced open water scuba diver and the key words are “Open Water”.  Just like the idiots that go chasing without a clue, I could fill up my air tank and go “Cave Diving” even though I probably would end up killing myself since I don’t have any training and Cave Diving.   Why don’t I go Cave Diving?  It’s called “Common Sense” because I don’t have the training and I have heard too many stories about people running out of air and drowning in the caves in Florida. 

Ugh, sorry for the rant but some people in the media just bug the crap out of me when they call anybody a “Storm Chaser” but they have no freaking clue about storm chasing.

And speaking of chasing last Sunday, I didn’t see anything worth reporting as the storms were moving pretty fast to the north.  I did get to hang out with my buddy Blake Naftel who was in the area chasing the storms back home to Michigan.  Blake was down in the huge outbreak the day before in Oklahoma and Kansas and worked his way up to Southern Minnesota to chase with me and catch some FauxNaders (fake tornadoes).

The day before on Saturday, while almost everyone I knew was out chasing Oklahoma and Kansas for the uber super tornado outbreak, Neva and I were in Minnesota at the Minnesota Skywarn Workshop.

The workshop was great to help get Neva up to speed if she is to go chasing with me this season to know what to look out for.  I was busy running the Chasers Edge booth so I missed most of the conference talks but had fun meeting everyone that stopped by the booth.

Outside of doing a ton of work for StormChasingVideo.com, I have not had much to go and photograph this month.  I’m in the office almost everyday working on stuff behind the scenes.  Even the Aurora’s have been pretty tame.  This is the only decent shot that I have taken all month. 

It really has been pretty boring around here.  Back on April 4th, I did meet up with Bill Doms after he called me to ask if I saw the smoke filling the air off to the east near the wild life refuge. 

So with nothing better to do and needing a break from working in the office, I picked up my camera and headed out to meet up with Bill.  These are some of the images I was able to shoot from the side of the road.  Well not really on the side of the road.  I parked in the refuge headquarters parking lot and walked along a trail on the side of a creek and under a bridge to the other side of the road were the fire was still burning. 

And speaking of fires, Neva and I were driving home after having a “Date Night” down in the north metro and came home to see a warehouse on fire.

Here is a short video of event that I shot.

Late Saturday night a fire broke out in a warehouse that was reported by officials on the scene as the warehouse for the that housed WW Inc. WW Inc is owned Charles Ward who also owns Saint Cloud State University Bookstore and Gas Station by the campus and Textbook1 on 9th and University Drive.

Crews were on the scene from about 8:30 PM to well past midnight trying to put out the fire and remove smoldering contents from what was left of the warehouse located at 2645 Clearwater Road.

Well that pretty much sums up what the heck I have been doing for the last month.  Working, working, more working on video production stuff for StormChasingVideo.com (BNVN).   I am going to be posting more updates on this site now that I have found a way to integrate my Twitter and Facebook posts with this site.   So now I just have to update Twitter and it should be updating everything.

Cross this shot off my bucket list.  I have wanted to get a photograph of the Cosmos, MN sign with an Aurora Borealis event in the background for about a decade.  This morning while trying to out from under the cloud cover I was able to get the shot. 

What is in a name?  When I first got on the internet back in 1996/1997, I used the joke name “Lightningboy” because it was a joke with some friends at work when I worked at ProColor.  It was a nickname that my friend Shane gave me that I pretty much hated.  So instead of letting him win and get the best of me, I embraced it and ran with it to turn the joke around on him. 

Well, one thing led to another and I got stuck with the nick name where it got to be so bad that some of the staff at The Weather Channel did not know my real name but only called me Lightningboy when we started up BNVN.

Fast forward over a decade later when I saw the storm chasing scene start to explode and the media started to call anyone with a video camera a “Storm Chaser”.  I needed to come up with something else for a term and a name.  While watching some celebrity TV news show, it came to me, Weather Paparazzi since the BNVN crew and myself are like the Hollywood Paparazzi except we stalk weather, not hunting down some celebrity. 

Since the term Paparazzi is defined by Websters as “a freelance photographer, especially one who takes candid pictures of celebrities for publication.” so the name was perfect, except for within certain groups of the Storm Chasing Community but only because I thought of the name first.

Now fast forward into 2012, now there is a running name joke between a few of the StormChasingVideo.com (BNVN) crews.  A couple of our guys, Chris Sanner and Brandon Sullivan with “Tornado Titans” storm chasing team and Randy Denzer and Verne Carlson with the new “Tornado Trojans” are doing battle. 
While the Titans only have hats and T-Shirts, it looks like the Tornado Trojans” have a kick ass lightning rod uniform and 3CCD HD cameras to do battle with the Titans. 

While I joked about having the Tornado Vikings storm chasing team, but that would mean I would have to look like the guys in the Capital One Visa Commercial.  I’ll think I’ll stick with my current look that is somewhat clean shaven with my steal toed boots to take care of annoying people and wanna be chasers (and sometimes annoying wanna be chasers).  

Just getting ready to wrap up for the night and get some much needed sleep. Neva and I were heading out before 10:00 pm to our secret spot to go and wait for the Northern Lights when several police cars were heading in the other direction really REALLY fast. And then more squad cars and even more squad cars, so we knew something was happening.

Turns out the first set of cars were chasing after a pickup truck that was fleeing and out of nowhere, at least a dozen more police and state troopers were on the scene.

About ten miles further south on Highway 10 near Clear Lake, the chase ended with one Chevy pickup truck totaled and one damaged Minnesota State Trooper car.

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So after that entertainment for the evening, our friend Dirk called us from Wisconsin and said that the Auroras were still pretty faint but he thought they might fire up later.  After a quick look at the data, we got back on the road and headed to the super secret location.  After about an hour, the Auroras came alive for a few minutes and then died back down.   Just long enough for us to get a few photos.

No sleep last night, Neva and I were watching the sky light up even with a full moon that tried to wash out the Auroras Borealis just north of Saint Cloud, MN.

The solar storm from the X Class solar flare finally hit and we shot stills and a pretty sweet time-lapse video as the storm was peaking as a “G3” Geomagnetic storm just after midnight as the KP reached 7.  

If the full moon was not out, this would have been a major event that would have been seen as far south as Kansas.

Here is the time-lapse footage from this morning that I put together of this event.  This is from midnight to after two in the morning.

This past weekend was fun, I got to see some old friends and make a lot of new friends.  Had a little scare on the drive out where it started to leak some fluids but ended up being a power steering line that was starting to fail.  I made it home and got the truck into the shop.

ChaserCon this year was different for me since I worked at the Chasers Edge booth with my friend Brandon Clark since another friend got sick and could not make it out to help out. 

Brandon, pictured with his girlfriend Arilla above, is a chaser that Chris Collura and I met back on the chase on 5/22/2008 and he is the mastermind behind the new clothing line at http://www.ChasersEdge.com. 

I missed a lot of the talks that I wanted to hear while helping out at the Chasers Edge booth so I was a little bummed out.  While the flip side was I was able to meet and greet a lot more people then I would have have if I was just sitting around listening to talks.  I practically chatted with almost 95% of crowd that was at the convention and those who I didn’t get a chance to talk to, Brandon did, so it was a pretty fun time and a huge success for the launch of his clothing line. 

Speaking of fun times, Friday morning, was the best part of ChasersCon.  The snowmobile trip that Tony, Chris and I always try to make up into the mountains and bring a few new people with for the fun.  This year, we brought Evan (Wipe out) Bookbinder, Scott Bennett, and Scott Hammel

We were up at the crack of dawn and left the hotel just after 6am to head up into the mountains for what Tony, Chris and I knew would be a life changing day for the rest when we got up on top of the divide.

After some practice runs around the test track, our guides had to get a few of the people in our group some warmer gear to they didn’t freeze their necks and face.  From then on, it was all fun with some joking around at Evan’s expense since his new nick name is Wipe Out. 

I was able to get one photograph that I have been after for years.  Since it has been a couple year’s from the last time we were out there, I have had this idea of one photograph that I have been wanting to redo with a wide lens and I finally got to get the shot.

Flying down the trails at 50 mph with taking photos behind me at the same time was pretty fun.

Tony and Scott Bennett taking a break at Tony’s mine.  The scarf is covering up the ear to ear grin on Scotts face.  The fun factor was off the charts.

Another scenic shot while working our way around the trails up to the pass.

And then the wow factor as we rode the sleds up to the top of the Continental Divide, at Georgia Pass where we were at 11,585 feet above sea level.

Below shows Tony, Scott and Evan having fun and looking off to the west on the top of the divide.

Chris Collura just amazed and talking about how he jumps out of planes to go skydiving from this height and now he is standing here again.

After we drove down off the divide, Tony redeems himself by making it past the area where he crashed last time when some idiots stopped around a blind corner to take a photo.  He drove off the side of the path and down a cliff instead of driving into them and killing them.

When we got back to the area where we started at, one of the managers showed us some of the new born sled dog puppies. 

Again, this year’s pre ChaserCon sledding event and almost everything with ChaserCon was perfect. 

I can finally post a blog about a project I helped out with that I had to keep under wraps until now.  A while back I was contacted by a production company in Los Angeles, CA about helping out with a new project they were working on for Mitsubishi Cars called “Ride The Storm”.

They needed some professional winter weather B-roll footage that showed some pretty intense driving conditions in winter storms and blizzards.  I was honored that they picked my footage for this project.  

They made two different versions of the project, one for television and one for the web commercials.

https://vimeo.com/43059950

Here is the extended copy of the internet commercial.

After the latest round of thunderstorm and early season tornadoes in Alabama, a lot of people on Facebook are freaking out about someone in the media that read a script on a prompter saying “Tornadoes Hit Without Warning”.  Really, you freak out on a talking head in front of a camera that reads a news script like Obama reads a speech but you don’t stop and look at a some of the chasers blowing it calling it a tornado without seeing a tornado.  What I’m talking about is the power flashes.

For the non weather geek readers of my blog, a power flash is simply a electrical line, transformer on a power pole or the fuse on the power line to the transformer shorting out.  Think of when you hook up jumper cables to your cars battery and you touch the two ends together and it sparks.  Same concept on a much larger scale.

The first video below is footage I shot during hurricane Rita back in 2005.  If you fast forward to the 1:25 mark in the video you will see prime examples of a power flash that are up close and personal.  This footage is some of the best power flashes ever caught on camera.  There were lots of power flashes but I was not in a tornado.

Now back to what my point is.  One thing that has kind of annoyed me with watching several video’s of the latest severe weather event is the linking of a power flash to equal that a tornado is on the ground and doing damage.  If you can not see the tornado back lit by lightning or city lights on a storm that is moving at 50 to 60+ miles per hour that the storm motion alone is guarantied straight line winds, can you really say it’s a tornado?

If there is a power flash, is there a tornado?  In the video below, fast forward and watch the footage from the two minute mark to about the two minute and twenty seconds and look for the power flashes.

Did you see the power flashes?  Was that a tornado on the ground?  No and most power flashes during a storm are caused by lightning hitting the power lines and blowing fuses at the transformers and straight line winds knocking down tree branches.  If I said every power flash was a tornado, I could add a few dozen more tornadoes to my count. Oh wait, I don’t keep a tornado count. Now I’m not going to call anyone out directly and name people but keep in mind next time you see a power flash, its not a tornado but the storm is doing damage. 

It could be a tornado, it could be lightning, it could be lightning hitting a tree and a branch falling on power lines, it could be a branch or other debris tossed into power-lines, unless you see the tornado can you say its a tornado with the speed those storms were moving?

Here is a prime example of power flashes but where is the tornado? There was none, straight line winds blew debris onto the power lines.

Of course there are a exceptions to this and that is if you are in the clear under a storm but you have good city lights at night to light up the rain free cloud base and you see a black wall of rain wrapped meso moving at you with major rotation under the rain free area, yes there might be a tornado in there if the storm is moving at 20 to 30 miles per hour. 

If the system is moving at speeds that are already considered above severe thunderstorm wind speeds, the power flashes could be from straight line debris or lightning.  Just know what you are looking at if you are going to call in a tornado report.

Last week when I updated my blog it was record warm temps and now its back to normal for winter in Minnesota.  Ahhh, I knew it would not last but we still have had one heck of a great winter with little snow cover and warm temps.  It is time to get back to normal before the spring storm chasing season starts up and were back to the chase.

Tonight Neva and I were out doing some photos at our spot up north of town where the light pollution is not bad.  I wanted to play around with the new camera setup some more now that the were entering into a new moon phase and get some cool star trails.

The photograph below is about an hour long exposure pointed towards the north star in the top center of the frame.  Still need to work on a few things but my goal is to do a 8 hour photo.  I just need to get up north and do this where the light pollution is zero.

Click on the image to see the larger image size.

Ok, today just was perfect and one of the days where I love my job because I get to work out side to document the weather. This time of year I should be wearing snow pants, big heavy coats and living in cold weather survival gear.  Today, I was wearing shorts and a T-Shirt outside while getting footage in Minneapolis, MN of people out in the record warm temps that made it feel more like April then the heart of Winter.

I know this won’t last long but it sure was nice just to get out and enjoy being outside with the hot sun keeping me warm when I should be freezing my arse off.

We shot the video at the Stone Arch Bridge in the heart of Minneapolis, MN and over at Lake Harriet in South Minneapolis. While shooting the second part of the video, Neva spotted someone looking up at a bird in a tree. The bird turned out to be a Red-tailed Hawk which let us walk right up to stand almost under the branch it was perched on. Neva said it just ate a whole mouse. After it looked around for a minute, it let out a shriek at us from about 10 feet away and then flew off right above us and then circled back to give us a show to photograph.

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