Just a few more. Storm photography can be fairly difficult–you have to be in the right place in the right time to get a decent shot. You have to rely on manual focus a lot, because many auto-focus mechanisms lose their “grip” in flowing conformist clouds and bad lighting conditions. The latter is just another problem–if you’re not careful you can easily overexpose or lose a lot of color definition because you’re metering in the wrong place. Sometimes you don’t even know what you have until you go back and look.
For this shot, it was a quick snap out of the driver window as I was racing down a highway in eastern Wyoming. It’s a developing storm but there various holes where crepescular rays are seemingly poking through the base. It looks okay, but to me this doesn’t look like a storm at all, and I want the crepescular rays highlighted in vibrant sunlight the way it should be. This was essentially a throw-away shot, but now it’s colorful and there’s a ton of cloud definition:
Honestly I think for this storm cell in South Dakota I cheated. A lot. I wanted sufficient light, color, and cloud definition, but I experimented with color differentials till I wanted the shades I thought looked good. I wanted the sky underneath to really show in its glowing warmth (I did ok), to show the various rain shafts, and the storm cell bursting with blue water. It’s one of the more artificial things I’ve ever done I think.
I remember here in Oklahoma I had no idea what I was looking at. Was it a strong gust, rear flank downdraft (RFD) kicking up dirt (with the notch potentially up on the right), or something else? I remember that I was hoping for a developing tornado that wanted to go and it never happened, right across I-35 from me in Norman. However, later I discovered at this time there actually was a short-lived, weak tornado that spawned off of the highway and plowed up a road, moving cars up the road and pushing them aside (there’s helicopter video of this floating around). Generally it got eclipsed by events further north, where a pair of truck stops got leveled by a much bigger twister (and coincidentally where the bulk of the chasers were). In any event, my objective now is to a) process a decent photo and b) uncover anything I might have missed. It sucks a little cause it’s slightly out of focus. Dropping the exposure, jacking the cloud contrast, and shifting the color a little now makes me believe this is a tornado shot: the top of the funnel is spinning at upper center (it’s got this great lip curl), but there’s no rain and hence no condensation funnel. But it is lightly connected with the ground–a lot of dirt is kicking around in the field beyond the highway. I’m fairly certain it’s not just a random gust of wind. This thing was spinning nicely up in the cloud base. So yeah, for this one I wanted to “rescue” a photo as much as I could and see what I could make out of it.
Finally there’s these awesome mammatus. Usually (but not always) they form on the backside of storms in turbulent, unsteady air and when they get going they are amazingly photogenic, because when big storms pass, it’s usually near dusk and you get awesome color. My big frustration is that I know for certain that there was a ton of golden tones in these clouds and for whatever reason, it wasn’t getting captured well enough. This looks, well, peachy. Everything else was okay–I think maybe out of focus a little, and the noise is a bit much. I think what I was trying was to get the foreground exposed nicely and I’d work the sky later, but I could never get it both going sufficiently. Working on a bit, I rescued the under-laying sky a bit but didn’t bring out too much in the terrain–it’s very, very noisy and I wound up smoothing it out instead. I didn’t want the mammatus to be too yellow/golden, but think I worked out a halfway-decent medium. The upper part may be a bit too dark/purplish. Plus, this shot looks like a long exposure and it’s actually not at all. Frustrating.
— Alan
