Are Storm Chasers Chasing the Storm or is The Storm Chasing Them?
Long time ago, before i even had my first DSLR camera i tried to photography lightning when ever i could. But i lived in a city on the last flor of a building with access to a rooftop. Lightning photos usually look good at night with stuff around illuminated with artificial light. If you catch a lightning hitting a tall building with cityscape around it, it will most probably look cool. If you catch a lightning hitting the empty flat field, most of the times it will be well a lightning hitting an empty field.
I also often see those cool photos of weird cloud formations, where you know nothing good will come from those clouds, but they look spectacular, often like an alien invasion.
I do have some photos of interesting clouds, but non of those spectacular storming ones.
So we come to today. The whole day there were reports of a storm coming. As it was close to sunset i thought it will be a good time for catching some lightning too. So i checked out the live lightning app to see what is the situation. It looked like it is still some time away.
I had an idea of where i would like to go to set up the shot. But as i was driving i saw i was a bit to late. The imagined spot was canceled and i stopped on the first crossroad that gave me the view of the clouds. It was not that alone spectacular cloud as there were already clouds in front of it. But it still looked interesting.
Didn't have a lot of time to set up, there were some nice sunflowers some 300m up the road, the bright yellow would probably look good with these dark clouds. Well maybe next time.
What i also learned there is a bit of a play with getting the shutter speed right to get those clouds and lightning. Sky was moving fast so slower shutter speed was making the clouds a bit blurry, and faster shutter speed makes it hard to time it right to get those lightnings. 10 sec exposures looked pretty good, 20 was a bit to much.
Now why the question from the title? I always assumed that for these photo you are trying to be in front of the storm, but these things move fast. I did not expect that. You can't really see it from these 2 photos but the difference is one exposure, so around 25 seconds. And one frame you see everything fine till the first wind mill and in the next one you can see the rain and the wind is on to you already.
So the storm chasers are probably running away from the storms, not chasing them?
In the end, the wind was pretty strong, with a good amount of rain. Luckily no hailstorm (few days ago it was pretty crazy some 60km from my place). Seen some bigger branches on the road, hope there were no damage done in the town.