Those pictures are, as usual, freakin' awesome. You should start putting up 1024x768 size pics, so I can use them as desktops without stretching them out of shape. :)

Thanks, Sumpin! :) I consider doing that sometimes, it's just that once you start getting into that resolution, you gotta worry about people ripping the photo off and selling them to stock agencies. Hollingshead, another Nebraskan weather photog, has had that happen to him a lot, and it's only as he's gone pro and had access to the lawyerpaults at Getty and Corbis that he's gotten it to stop.

cool pics. That's the one thing I like about kansas, the badass spring weather.

Amazing pics as usual! Thanks for sharing. One of your pics from a month or two ago is my work desktop :)

bamtam700:cool pics. That's the one thing I like about kansas, the badass spring weather.

Yeah, it's hard for me to admit, as I thought I'd never find a more beautiful place in the world for storms to roam than Nebraska, but Kansas in Spring really is something special beyond words.

E-Brake:Amazing pics as usual! Thanks for sharing. One of your pics from a month or two ago is my work desktop :)


Thanks! :) You just reminded me... it's time to change mine!

Amazing - and another reason not to move to Kansas. Beautiful work!

Excellent pictures. Bad weather.

Beautiful, as usual. Thank you for sharing!!

Hey chakalasp, the striations on that meso were pretty freaking sweet. Here's a panaroma that Darin Brunin stitched together this morning.

Gorgeous as always!

That shot's awesome, YoungSweedishBlonde! That's the shot that I kinda wanted to get, but couldn't get east of the storm fast enough. :) (I don't care what the weather service said -- that storm was moving waaay faster than 15 miles per hour!) Give Darin my congrats!

chakalakasp,

Outstanding! Without a doubt, the pix you posted are the epitome of the old phrase, "luck is when opportunity meets preparedness".

Those images brought back memories of when I lived in Woods County, Oklahoma. I never saw weather like that, and suppose that it could have been unhealthy in the extreme if I did. Never needed to get down to the "cellar" during my time there. But the possibility of a tornado was always lurking just past the edges of my conscious mind.

chakalakasp

I sold off most of my bone marrow to get the Canon 10-22 lens.. Now, to get busy with it!!

/farktography has become my new best friend, besides teh pr0n

:)

Three years in Lubbock, countless narsty storms, and I never did get to see anything nearly as cool as that...

Submitter and chakalakasp both rock!

/Is incredibly jealous...

Thanks, Savinkov! Yeah, I grew up in Iowa, and the threat of tornadoes were something you just learned to live with. Most people who come to visit me here in Nebraska always wonder how the heck we can live with the worry of having some random tornado asplode our homes. Some of these folks live on some of the largest fault lines in the country, so I think think they're nuts. ;)

markie_farkie: I'm almost positive that you'll love that lens. It feels like a huge gamble when you first get it because it's such a specialty lens, but it opens up the door to a whole new type of photography. I've always loved other people's ultrawide photography, so that lens has made me feel right at home. I do find that people seem to have strong opinions about it -- another photo friend of mine can't *stand* how much it distorts things at the edges, whereas I love the distortion.

Fascinating and beautiful images chakalakasp.
I would love to be able to take pictures like that but
1) I have no talent for it.
2) Here in the UK, the most dramatic shots would be of a moderate drizzle.
3) I'm far too cheap to buy a decent camera and lens. What are you using?

Awesome, the crisp look and bright colors are astounding.

I've never posted in any of your threads, but I've always enjoyed your work. I love the lens a lot, shots taken with pretty much any kind of specialty lens are really intresting to me. Keep up the good work, and dont die out there.

Is that the face of Jesus in I see in one of those ?

Automatic Jack:Fascinating and beautiful images chakalakasp.
I would love to be able to take pictures like that but
1) I have no talent for it.
2) Here in the UK, the most dramatic shots would be of a moderate drizzle.
3) I'm far too cheap to buy a decent camera and lens. What are you using

Hey, if you really do love photography, learning it is a lot easier than you'd think! 6 years ago I couldn't shoot for crap. I just picked up a SLR camera, read a lotta books, and took a lotta pictures. Eventually it all just starts clicking. :) You don't need a great camera setup to take great pictures -- a $150 Pentax K-1000, coupled with the right lens and the right slide film, can match the quality of a $3000 digital camera, so long as you know what you're doing. It's just that digital makes life so much easier that a lotta photographers, especially photojournalists, are switching to it. I use a Canon 20D for digital and a Canon EOS-3 for film. The lens for all the photos in this post was a Canon 10-22 f/3.5-4.5. Oh -- and yeah, the UK sucks for weather photography (usually), though they do have their moments. I actually know over the net a couple guys from the UK who fly out here every year right about now to chase storms. But the UK actually has storm chasing clubs, if you can believe it. And heck, you guys have so much cool architecture, who needs a supercell to keep their camera busy? ;)

Wowwwwwwww---thanks for sharing!---that is stunning!---I get excited just seeing a few snowflakes fall---so beautiful

Those pictures are amazing.

/scary clouds
//Eeeek!
///POOPA PANTSA!!!

When the apocolypse happens, heres what it will look like

Yeah, I got to see the action from my front porch in Stockton last night.

I just set your farm picture as my laptop background. It is really cool. I love the contrast and the blue lights in the clouds.

Thank you for sharing your work chakalakasp

Nice shootin', Ryan. Interestingly enough, two seconds before I saw this thread I was looking at one of your storm photos on PhotoSig.

/small intarweb.

chakalakasp: It feels like a huge gamble when you first get it because it's such a specialty lens, but it opens up the door to a whole new type of photography.

Hey, email me markfetzner *at* mac *dot* com and I'll send you a link of some stuff I've taken with the new lens.. Nothing special, but it's a start....

Photoshopped. The fact that he's selling them solidified it.

If I'm wrong, I sincerely apologize, but I just don't buy these. They don't just look "cool", they look fake.

Tom Cruise unavailable for comment?

Simply incredible photos. Those shots are putting anything I've seen in National Geo down to shame! Very disturbing skies there indeed!

I always enjoy your pics, but you need to change your definition of super-biggified. 850 pixels wide is kind of a joke.

/1680x1050
//wants true high-res pics
///hi-res pics through membership to your blog would be great
////I'm talkin' huge pics here

KelanKrowli

You're probably right, these are "photoshopped." But probably nothing more than levels, saturation, unsharp mask, and maybe a bit of clone tool here or there.

(standard procedure in all post-production digital photography)

Photoshopped or not, these pics are the awesome...

Nice shots...not far from me either, we'll have a quite a few more like that before the season is all said and done. There may be nothing to do here but this time of year the skies get fun.

KelanKrowli
That's how storms look in Kansas, no fluffy rain clowds. The clouds are the result of two different air masses colliding.

Photoshop + World Builder = these pics. The pic above with the blue and purple colors gives that away.
/Not tryin to be "that guy" just callin what I see

Beautiful indeed! Good jorb.

great shots, stunning really.
I would running very quickly in the opposite direction if I happened to walk into that,,,

I wonder if any of the "clearly a fake" crowd have ever SEEN a really nasty Tornado Alley storm up close and personal...

/Would probably wet their pants if they did...
//Not tryin to be "that guy" just callin what I see

Yep, you're dead on, Ian -- and actually, usually as a rule I don't even use the clone tool, or at least, when I do, I usually mention that I do. IMG9248 had a tiny touch of clone tool in the lower left corner, but it was so minor it didn't bother me. My toning is somewhat artistic, but I'm mostly just trying to get the photo to what I "saw" when I was there. Photographs, especially digital photographs, can only capture a very limited range of dynamic information when compared to the human eye and brain. Actually, if the human eye were a purchasable "camera", and were priced solely on performance, it would probably cost many tens of thousands of dollars, as it does a much better job of capturing detail and tonal range than anything that humans can make.

ian.m

You're probably right, these are "photoshopped." But probably nothing more than levels, saturation, unsharp mask, and maybe a bit of clone tool here or there.

OK, I retract the "clone tool" part. Some of his comments to his photos on PhotoSig say:

...While I didn't do anything to the image that would be considered unethical by a publisher (no cloning or anything like that)....

cycotica
I've lived in Tornado Alley all my life and I'm still amazed with the weather Kansas has.

Merltech:

I've lived in Tornado Alley all my life and I'm still amazed with the weather Kansas has.

Ditto...I saw some nasty stuff in Lubbock, but being on sort of the outskirts of that climatic area it has NUTHIN' on Kansas...

The worst storms are the ones that go East to West. They are actually going up stream and the weather really is fun than. Also like when two large weather cells move over each other.

cycotica: I wonder if any of the "clearly a fake" crowd have ever SEEN a really nasty Tornado Alley storm up close and personal...

Yeah. The deathly-still air, with those funky greenish clouds swirling around really can't be captured on "film" correctly. You have to be there to experience it.

/lived in West Texas for quite a while.

Liam2000:Photoshop + World Builder = these pics. The pic above with the blue and purple colors gives that away.
/Not tryin to be "that guy" just callin what I see

Lol, that's a new one! :) I don't blame you for thinking that though, as nature can get pretty unbelieveable sometimes. The weird thing about living on the plains is that to some degree you kinda get used to it, and you forget that it looks mindblowing to people who don't live out here.

Here's a pic of my chase partner takin' his turn at the wheel before the core of the storm slid north over the highway and we had to punch that bad-boy. (He's not actually an alien, the distortion is caused by the lens. :))

you guys gotta be freaking nuts to live out there in the plains. shiat like that doesn't happen in the NE.

Weekly World News will use that with an angry God face superimposed over Iraq in 3.. 2.. 1..

//or the batboy flying out of it...

Call me crazy, but when I moved from South Texas to North (and subsequently West) Texas, I was the nutjob actually going outside and staring at the storms while everyone else was running for a hallway or interior room...

The fun stuff is when you get thunderstorms in a blizzard.