Remember that movie about the people who spent all their time driving across the continental USA in pursuit of tornados? Twister, I seem to recall it being titled. It depicted the lives and loves of people so obsessed with extreme weather phenomena that they’d risk life, limb and ute to hunt a tornado and subject it to various measurements while capturing it on video.
Sure, we all accept that there are people who did that. Apart from anything else, it’s the US, where there’s space and population numbers for all manner of niche groups – not to mention the conditions for weather on the extremest of scales.
But then a few years ago, I happened upon the work of certain photographers who make a living chasing storms – not necessarily twisters – and creating amazing images of them. Living in Singapore at the time, where there’s thunder and lightning every other day, this seemed like a creative avenue worth pursuing.
The fascination is difficult to explain, but perhaps it’s something to do with the drama – a good equatorial thunderstorm is the petulant prima donna of weather events: full of bluster and grand gestures, like slamming doors and flouncing out of the room, only with clouds, rain, lightning and thunder. During the monsoon, you could virtually set your watch by the late-afternoon atmospheric tantrum, as yet again the heavens threw a hissy fit and flung themselves on the bed weeping uncontrollably.
Anyway, not to overtax the metaphor, the grandiosity of these events and the fleeting drama of the lightning in particular was worth immortalising in pixels. Because there were so many opportunities, having a go soon reaped modest rewards. It was pretty satisfying seeing a fat, purple lightning bolt frozen forever in time. But more than capturing a bolt, making a pleasing picture around it was a real challenge of the photographer’s skills.
This required new gadgets and gear (come on, we all know that’s part of the pleasure) and adapting others. I was blessed with a corner study in an art deco building which had windows that curved around two sides of the room, giving a 90-degree view of the jungly hills of Malaysia, plus a few high-rise buildings to add scale and variety. From the comfort of this lair, rather in the mode of the mad professor of fiction, I could direct my devices at the storm while remaining safe and dry. There was even a sofa to lounge on if pursuing the perfect storm became too taxing.
Sure, there were other vantage points, but Singapore really didn’t lend itself to the mad cross-country dashes my hero storm-chasers in the US undertook routinely. Too much traffic; too small an island.
Yet of course, the world turns, the seasons come and go, and people migrate across the face of the planet, perhaps finding themselves in rural New South Wales. The equipment lay carefully packed; the cameras turned their undiscerning gaze on birds, butterflies and bees. But the soul of the stormchaser can’t be tamed, my friends, and when the weather forecast predicted a cold front with lightning would reach us this afternoon, the beast required feeding.
And we now have access to a capacious vehicle, smelling lightly of goat, to ferry the photographer and his tools to likely vantage points, there to practice his dark art. Which, in short, is what we did today.
At about 4pm, the skies began to darken. I stashed the kit, including two tripods, in the goatmobile and took off in the direction of the purplest clouds. How much better than a corner study was this! No longer would Mohamed wait for the mountain to come to him – with the power of vintage German engineering at his bidding, Mohamed could track down the mountain wherever it chose to go!
Today it was the Cooma road. The clouds were piling up to the west and from a slight rise with a charming vista before us, we set up shop. Birds chirped and a bunch of horses in a nearby paddock headed over to check out what was afoot. With the technology all set up and tested, there remained little more to do than wait. After two minutes it dawned that a good book might have been welcome right about then – and maybe a sofa to read it on.
I was there for about 45 minutes and while there were some very distant flashes in the turbulent sky, there was little to bother the shutters of the waiting cameras. A choice loomed – stay and wait, or fire up the Benz and chase? The online gurus hadn’t provided much guidance. Back went all the gear into the car, and we chased.
Maybe 30km down the road, I was starting to despair that all this drama was going on somewhere and I was tooling about the countryside without a clue. And there were few places to stop just there, with good views over the landscape – too many trees. But then – a gap! And visible flashes in the heavens. Out came all the gear, to an accompaniment of loud and quite remarkably prolonged thunder – always a good sign.
But there’s always something, isn’t there? A few good CGs (that’s cloud-to-ground strikes to the non-chaser) went off, but went unphotographed as the fast-moving front had moved out of frame within minutes. Adjust and wait; re-set and wait; wait wait wait. And then it started to rain: lightly at first, and then not so lightly – so back went the gear into the car and off we went again.
Heading back to town, the rearview mirror showed the sunset combining beautifully with the storm – just one good shot of that little lot would make all the waiting worthwhile. So again the ritual: unpack, this time in the rain, set up under the open rear hatch, and hope for the best. There was one stupendous strike – but mainly out of frame! You be the judge as to whether this is a successful pic – I can’t look at it without being disappointed that the camera wasn’t pointing in quite the right place.
But you know what? It was a pretty good couple of hours – hitting the road with a load of gear, driving through picturesque scenery with dramatic skies in the offing, and getting to grips with the many variables and technicalities of the photographic craft proved that it’s the chase, rather than the kill, that thrills. Now – how to do it all while staying dry . . . is there a gadget for that?