Author: Doug

I was told the other day that I have not updated my personal blog page or site in a couple months.  Well maybe because there really has not been much happening.  Yeah I had the retarded stalker that I had to file a police report on who turned out to be a youth counselor at a local christian center and church who was pissed off because we shot some news footage he didn’t like.  Oh wow, you don’t like the news and you are a “Christian” Youth Counselor, well “Forgive Me…”  Yeah, Foxtrot Delta Bravo… (Fn D Bag).

What else is going on in life since the weather is in the doldrums.  The last chase I went on was on 8/15/2012 where the lightning was pretty insane.  So it has been a month since I have picked up the camera.  Here is the video.

I did not chase the wannabe hurricane Isaac that hit late last month due to the fact that it was not even a full hurricane until it made landfall.  Also the fact that I wanted at least one good hurricane to hit the gulf coast to wash up all the left over oil pollution that sunk to the sea floor before I go down and play in the storm surge.  From the footage that I saw, I did not miss much.

Auroras, yeah I did get some sweet auroras back on July 15, 2012 that I should have posted here but again, I have been just deep in the video editing work on the Fury Project, that I have not paid much attention to my personal site.
Here is the Aurora footage. 

Well, it is almost 11 P.M and I need to wrap up and call it a night while the computers are on auto pilot uploading, encoding and archiving footage. 

My goal is for the Fury project to be finished by the end of the month.  What is the Fury project?  Tune in October 1st.   Also, if you don’t see me posting, check my twitter feed http://www.Twitter.com/WXPaparazzi to keep up with the day to day stuff.  

ahhhh, back from a dive trip and got some much needed rest and relaxation on a working vacation in Florida.  So how does a working trip equal a vacation?  Simple, 100 miles out in the middle of the gulf shooting HD video of the Coral Reefs with no cell phone or internet or anyone bugging me for a few days and I get to dive, yeah, it was a tough gig…  I’m still logging the video but here are a couple of still photos from the trip.

So, I have not just been slacking off and scuba diving, I have been working like crazy on stuff behind the scenes for the StormChasingVideo.com site upgrade with all the new stock video files. 

I have also been busy with going out and documenting the severe storms and even the latest round of solar storms that have been happening.  This morning, I was able to get this rare event on the Northeast side of Saint Cloud, MN where the sun was coming up and giving me an orange glow on the horizon while I was trying to get some photos of the planets rising.  I used my 10mm wide lens and the Auroras spiked for a couple minutes in the predawn glow with Jupiter and Venus rising in the eastern sky.

Earlier this week, the Northern Lights were more active here in Central Minnesota and I was able to get another sweet time-lapse video of them dancing across the sky on the morning of July 9th.

The auroras have not been the only story for me as the storms put on a cool looking lightning show over Minneapolis last weekend where I was able to shoot some video of the lightning over Lake Calhoun.

Well I better get back to work on the boring side of my job.  I have a bunch of paperwork and databases to review for the coming upgrades but it is all part of this fun gig I call chasing for a living.

Ok, with Facebook making my updates way too easy, I keep blowing off updating my actual website.  I do have the twitter feed on the left so I hope it has kept some people updated.

So, what the heck have I been up to over the last month? For one, been really busy working on the new website for BNVN StormChasingVideo.com and getting things up to speed now that I have some help with it.  It’s going to be pretty slick since my vision of what the ultimate stock footage site should be is finally coming true. 

I have also been dealing with Youtube Parasites.  What is a “YouTube Parasite”, it is someone that has no problem with copyright infringement and will use your work with no regard to Federal Copyright laws. 

They are using software that will record your footage from your YouTube Channel while it is playing back at high quality from YouTube to then re-upload on their YouTube Channel to gain views and collect the ad-revenue themselves.  We have shut down several YouTube channels over the last month and are always looking for more people ripping off our content.

It’s a high tech video piracy that costs a lot of good content producers a lot of money and wastes our time to enforce our own copyrights.   One of the idiots that we busted a few weeks ago was making some serious bank off of ripping off videos and re-posting them to their YouTube Channel that had over 25 Million Views.  According to one of the stats websites I used, the 25 Million Views is about $65,000.00 per year in ad-revenue that they pirated off other content producers. 

The worst part was they even tried to fight the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) requests that I sent into YouTube to remove the videos.  I was pretty pissed off about the whole deal and was booking a flight to personally go to their city and file a Federal Copyright Injunction against them and go all “Les Grossman” on them.

I was thinking of a way to make this into a national news story and I talked it over with some news producers friends of mine and that was when they said WTF?  I told them what was happening with the “YouTube Parasites” and they reminded me that the News Media is always hurting to hold on to revenue and if someone is ripping off their content and directing viewers away from their website and their on line advertisers, they want to know about it not for a story but to sue the crap out of the people ripping them off.  The next day, the idiot that was ripping me off and trying to fight the DMCA request got to deal with another “Les Grossman” from Hollywood and their channel ripping off all the video was gone.

The moral to the story is, if you are going to re-post other people’s content to YouTube, you better have some agreement in place or you will get sued if you are making money off the re-posted content.

In other news of what is happening in my life, the May 2012 storm chasing season was pretty much dead.  There where a few storms but I did not venture out to spend days on end to chase since there was nothing happening. 

I did chase on 5/5/2012,  Storm Chase from Mitchell, SD to Ward, MN/

I also chased around home on 5/18/2012 for the Stearns County, MN, Vivid Lightning and huge hail.

And of course I did the 5/20/2012 Eclipse Sunset over central Minnesota.

But the big story for me for the month of May was on 5/28/2012 Raw news footage of Sartell’s Verso paper plant fire, Sartell MN Fire.

The latest chase for me was the 6/17/2012 Minnesota Tornadic Storms Footage that I shot out by Wheaton, MN to just northwest of Montevideo, MN.  The storms were pretty cool and per SPC, the Wheaton, MN storm did have two tornadoes on it but I never saw them touch down.

Well, I have a computer to fix, paperwork to work on, a forecast for a possible storm chase later in the day, dive gear check out this week, answer a bunch of emails and a bunch of other stuff I need to find on my notes of what I have to do before next week.  

Here are some photos for the blog from the last chase.  Waiting for some fool to say it looks like Aliens are landing now. 

Brand new video from Stearns County, MN of the tornado that dropped just west of Saint Cloud and moved into the metro area.

Severe storms hit central Minnesota and super-cell thunderstorms produced several tornadoes from just south of Sauk Centre to Saint Cloud.

Video starts out with footage that Neva took in Saint Cloud, MN of a very large wall cloud over Saint Cloud, MN.  That is the first three clips in the video.

The remaining video are of the tornadoes on the ground about four miles south of Sauk Centre, MN.

Tornado watch has been issued and I’m Chasing just west of home on the first day of May and not 1000 miles away for once.  

Early this morning, Neva and I headed out to see the Auroras Borealis or Northern Lights.  We had to get out of the cloud cover and our first stop was up at Lake Osakis in Osakis, MN.  The Aurora was pretty bright but it was just a bright green arc in the sky and was not doing much.

So while the glow was cool, it just was not cutting it for what we were looking for in the photography since it was just a green band in the sky.  While I know most people that have never seen the Northern Lights before would say “what the heck are you talking about, that’s looks amazing”, well I have seen better and knew the setup could look a lot more impressive.

Lucky for us the clouds started to move in and ruin the show and we were forced to move out to the west and north.  After a quick phone call to our friend Dirk in Wisconsin, he said that the only area of clear sky was up near Fergus Falls, MN.  Hearing this news made me remember the location of the windmill that I found last fall and thought maybe I could pull of the shot that I have been trying to get for the last decade of a intense Aurora Borealis on a wide angle shot with a windmill in the foreground. 

We found the location and as soon as we started to setup our camera gear, sky exploded.  How do I define “The Sky Exploded”? The image below was shot using a very wide angle 10MM camera lens and the windmill was about 25 feet in front of me.

Also I didn’t just shoot photographs, I also setup the camera to do a time-lapse video of the event.  Here is the video that has been all over CNN, The Weather Channel and ABC News this morning. 

Well, I need sleep, I stopped over at the office to get blog updated before getting some much needed sleep.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll get myself down to Nebraska to chase some tornadoes.

This weekend there was some cold core storms that caught a lot of the local chasers off guard.  Reports of weak tornadoes got everyone’s attention fast and by the time I got out the door, the storm system died off to be just a heavy rain event.

The day was not a total bust as it also was a location scouting trip for new photo sites.  This year I’m going to be looking for abandoned sites to photograph around the Midwest.   We found this old school house that was closed down in 1958.

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).