Author: Doug

Just getting ready to wrap up for the night and get some much needed sleep. Neva and I were heading out before 10:00 pm to our secret spot to go and wait for the Northern Lights when several police cars were heading in the other direction really REALLY fast. And then more squad cars and even more squad cars, so we knew something was happening.

Turns out the first set of cars were chasing after a pickup truck that was fleeing and out of nowhere, at least a dozen more police and state troopers were on the scene.

About ten miles further south on Highway 10 near Clear Lake, the chase ended with one Chevy pickup truck totaled and one damaged Minnesota State Trooper car.

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So after that entertainment for the evening, our friend Dirk called us from Wisconsin and said that the Auroras were still pretty faint but he thought they might fire up later.  After a quick look at the data, we got back on the road and headed to the super secret location.  After about an hour, the Auroras came alive for a few minutes and then died back down.   Just long enough for us to get a few photos.

No sleep last night, Neva and I were watching the sky light up even with a full moon that tried to wash out the Auroras Borealis just north of Saint Cloud, MN.

The solar storm from the X Class solar flare finally hit and we shot stills and a pretty sweet time-lapse video as the storm was peaking as a “G3” Geomagnetic storm just after midnight as the KP reached 7.  

If the full moon was not out, this would have been a major event that would have been seen as far south as Kansas.

Here is the time-lapse footage from this morning that I put together of this event.  This is from midnight to after two in the morning.

This past weekend was fun, I got to see some old friends and make a lot of new friends.  Had a little scare on the drive out where it started to leak some fluids but ended up being a power steering line that was starting to fail.  I made it home and got the truck into the shop.

ChaserCon this year was different for me since I worked at the Chasers Edge booth with my friend Brandon Clark since another friend got sick and could not make it out to help out. 

Brandon, pictured with his girlfriend Arilla above, is a chaser that Chris Collura and I met back on the chase on 5/22/2008 and he is the mastermind behind the new clothing line at http://www.ChasersEdge.com. 

I missed a lot of the talks that I wanted to hear while helping out at the Chasers Edge booth so I was a little bummed out.  While the flip side was I was able to meet and greet a lot more people then I would have have if I was just sitting around listening to talks.  I practically chatted with almost 95% of crowd that was at the convention and those who I didn’t get a chance to talk to, Brandon did, so it was a pretty fun time and a huge success for the launch of his clothing line. 

Speaking of fun times, Friday morning, was the best part of ChasersCon.  The snowmobile trip that Tony, Chris and I always try to make up into the mountains and bring a few new people with for the fun.  This year, we brought Evan (Wipe out) Bookbinder, Scott Bennett, and Scott Hammel

We were up at the crack of dawn and left the hotel just after 6am to head up into the mountains for what Tony, Chris and I knew would be a life changing day for the rest when we got up on top of the divide.

After some practice runs around the test track, our guides had to get a few of the people in our group some warmer gear to they didn’t freeze their necks and face.  From then on, it was all fun with some joking around at Evan’s expense since his new nick name is Wipe Out. 

I was able to get one photograph that I have been after for years.  Since it has been a couple year’s from the last time we were out there, I have had this idea of one photograph that I have been wanting to redo with a wide lens and I finally got to get the shot.

Flying down the trails at 50 mph with taking photos behind me at the same time was pretty fun.

Tony and Scott Bennett taking a break at Tony’s mine.  The scarf is covering up the ear to ear grin on Scotts face.  The fun factor was off the charts.

Another scenic shot while working our way around the trails up to the pass.

And then the wow factor as we rode the sleds up to the top of the Continental Divide, at Georgia Pass where we were at 11,585 feet above sea level.

Below shows Tony, Scott and Evan having fun and looking off to the west on the top of the divide.

Chris Collura just amazed and talking about how he jumps out of planes to go skydiving from this height and now he is standing here again.

After we drove down off the divide, Tony redeems himself by making it past the area where he crashed last time when some idiots stopped around a blind corner to take a photo.  He drove off the side of the path and down a cliff instead of driving into them and killing them.

When we got back to the area where we started at, one of the managers showed us some of the new born sled dog puppies. 

Again, this year’s pre ChaserCon sledding event and almost everything with ChaserCon was perfect. 

I can finally post a blog about a project I helped out with that I had to keep under wraps until now.  A while back I was contacted by a production company in Los Angeles, CA about helping out with a new project they were working on for Mitsubishi Cars called “Ride The Storm”.

They needed some professional winter weather B-roll footage that showed some pretty intense driving conditions in winter storms and blizzards.  I was honored that they picked my footage for this project.  

They made two different versions of the project, one for television and one for the web commercials.

https://vimeo.com/43059950

Here is the extended copy of the internet commercial.

After the latest round of thunderstorm and early season tornadoes in Alabama, a lot of people on Facebook are freaking out about someone in the media that read a script on a prompter saying “Tornadoes Hit Without Warning”.  Really, you freak out on a talking head in front of a camera that reads a news script like Obama reads a speech but you don’t stop and look at a some of the chasers blowing it calling it a tornado without seeing a tornado.  What I’m talking about is the power flashes.

For the non weather geek readers of my blog, a power flash is simply a electrical line, transformer on a power pole or the fuse on the power line to the transformer shorting out.  Think of when you hook up jumper cables to your cars battery and you touch the two ends together and it sparks.  Same concept on a much larger scale.

The first video below is footage I shot during hurricane Rita back in 2005.  If you fast forward to the 1:25 mark in the video you will see prime examples of a power flash that are up close and personal.  This footage is some of the best power flashes ever caught on camera.  There were lots of power flashes but I was not in a tornado.

Now back to what my point is.  One thing that has kind of annoyed me with watching several video’s of the latest severe weather event is the linking of a power flash to equal that a tornado is on the ground and doing damage.  If you can not see the tornado back lit by lightning or city lights on a storm that is moving at 50 to 60+ miles per hour that the storm motion alone is guarantied straight line winds, can you really say it’s a tornado?

If there is a power flash, is there a tornado?  In the video below, fast forward and watch the footage from the two minute mark to about the two minute and twenty seconds and look for the power flashes.

Did you see the power flashes?  Was that a tornado on the ground?  No and most power flashes during a storm are caused by lightning hitting the power lines and blowing fuses at the transformers and straight line winds knocking down tree branches.  If I said every power flash was a tornado, I could add a few dozen more tornadoes to my count. Oh wait, I don’t keep a tornado count. Now I’m not going to call anyone out directly and name people but keep in mind next time you see a power flash, its not a tornado but the storm is doing damage. 

It could be a tornado, it could be lightning, it could be lightning hitting a tree and a branch falling on power lines, it could be a branch or other debris tossed into power-lines, unless you see the tornado can you say its a tornado with the speed those storms were moving?

Here is a prime example of power flashes but where is the tornado? There was none, straight line winds blew debris onto the power lines.

Of course there are a exceptions to this and that is if you are in the clear under a storm but you have good city lights at night to light up the rain free cloud base and you see a black wall of rain wrapped meso moving at you with major rotation under the rain free area, yes there might be a tornado in there if the storm is moving at 20 to 30 miles per hour. 

If the system is moving at speeds that are already considered above severe thunderstorm wind speeds, the power flashes could be from straight line debris or lightning.  Just know what you are looking at if you are going to call in a tornado report.

Last week when I updated my blog it was record warm temps and now its back to normal for winter in Minnesota.  Ahhh, I knew it would not last but we still have had one heck of a great winter with little snow cover and warm temps.  It is time to get back to normal before the spring storm chasing season starts up and were back to the chase.

Tonight Neva and I were out doing some photos at our spot up north of town where the light pollution is not bad.  I wanted to play around with the new camera setup some more now that the were entering into a new moon phase and get some cool star trails.

The photograph below is about an hour long exposure pointed towards the north star in the top center of the frame.  Still need to work on a few things but my goal is to do a 8 hour photo.  I just need to get up north and do this where the light pollution is zero.

Click on the image to see the larger image size.

Ok, today just was perfect and one of the days where I love my job because I get to work out side to document the weather. This time of year I should be wearing snow pants, big heavy coats and living in cold weather survival gear.  Today, I was wearing shorts and a T-Shirt outside while getting footage in Minneapolis, MN of people out in the record warm temps that made it feel more like April then the heart of Winter.

I know this won’t last long but it sure was nice just to get out and enjoy being outside with the hot sun keeping me warm when I should be freezing my arse off.

We shot the video at the Stone Arch Bridge in the heart of Minneapolis, MN and over at Lake Harriet in South Minneapolis. While shooting the second part of the video, Neva spotted someone looking up at a bird in a tree. The bird turned out to be a Red-tailed Hawk which let us walk right up to stand almost under the branch it was perched on. Neva said it just ate a whole mouse. After it looked around for a minute, it let out a shriek at us from about 10 feet away and then flew off right above us and then circled back to give us a show to photograph.

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Every time I do photography near the Mississippi or when I lived in Burnsville of the Minnesota River, I always had the saying “One world, one soul, time pass, the river rolls” run through my head from a song.

Tonight I was working at the office and killing time while waiting for some footage to encode.  Yes I finally have private office space that I rent to keep the business out of the home and the work out of the home to try and have a somewhat normal life. 

Right behind the office is the Mississippi River and when I say right behind, I mean you walk about 50 yards down a dirt path and you are at the rivers edge.  I explored the path a few months back before the first snow fall and thought it would make a great walking path and photo opportunity one day.  Well that one day, or night was here and my editing computer told me it would take about 45 minutes for a video to render before I could start the upload to my agent and go home.  What to do for 45 minutes?  I could watch infomercials at two in the morning but I thought what could I do?  That is when I remembered it was a full moon out and I had the path down to the river right behind the studio.

After a short phone call to Neva to make sure she knew I would not be doing anything stupid like walking out into the middle of the river on thin ice to get a photograph, I was off to the rivers edge, to walk on so so ice that was only a couple of inches thick to get some great photographs. 

The scene was perfect along the river for the photo that I have pictured in my mind before walking down to the spot.  The moon was lighting up the area and the river was calm with a nice ledge of ice to walk on along the side of the river.

(Note, click on the image to see the larger image on all of these photographs)

I was using the new 10mm lens at F5 with a thirty second exposure at 400 ISO to get a ghostly like image with the stars out but looking like daylight out at the same time.

I used my red head lamp to fill the white sow to make the scene look blood red.  This is some old school burning and dodge while the camera was taking a 30 second exposure at F5 with a 10mm lens.  While taking this photograph, I could hear a bird on the other side of the river or on the island calling out.   It was pretty spooky because it sounded like an Eagle calling out in the middle of the night.

Below is the same shot but without me filling the scene with the red fill light. That is correct, the photo above is filled in during the photo, not after with Photoshop. 

The level in the camera said it was level but it is still higher on the right for some reason in the photo below.  This is also at F4, 10MM for Thirty Seconds at 400 ISO with the full moon just a little behind me over my head.

And the last photo is right at the rivers and ice edge looking out towards an island in the middle of the river.  The ice was a few inches thick here but the river was only a few inches deep here so it was safe to get this shot. 

Yesterday, Jan 4th, 2012, Earth passed through a stream of debris from shattered comet 2003 EH1 which is the source of the Quadrantid meteors.

While not feeling that great, I went out in the cold weather and hung out in the uber secret spot that I use when I need to be in almost total darkness just north of Saint Cloud.  I say almost total darkness as in no traffic, no street lights and no light pollution in the field of view.

Below is the only photo that I was able to get of a fireball.  The 3/4 full moon made it hard to see the fireballs and meteors as the light washed out the sky. 

Just below the north star is a fireball, the only one that I was able to document.  The Quadrantid Meteors was not what it was hyped up to be and that may be due to the fact of the bright moon.  It was not a total waste of time as it did make a great proof of concept for doing another project which is to do a 8 hour exposure of the stars in this spot to get a true star trails photograph.

Happy New Year Everyone.  One of my New Years resolutions is make sure I update my blog on a more timely basis.  It’s not my fault, it’s that freaking Facebook, it makes it too easy to just update a status and move on.

So, lets see what I have been up to since I last forgot to update my blog.  Well, not much.  The weather here in Minnesota has been pretty boring, ok, its beyond boring and there has not been much to write about.  Just been working on the behind the scenes stuff and finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on massive archive project. The YouTube channel now has over 2,000 videos on it.

Other than some test photos I did with the ultra wide camera gear I picked up I have not even picked up the camera gear to shoot anything since there has nothing to photograph of video tape.  We just got the first real snow up in Minnesota this past week and even that was about an inch.  The forecast shows that should melt off this week with temps in the upper 40s this week. 

There is a bright spot to the lack of weather in Minnesota if that means I don’t have snow storms to document.  The heating bill will be lower, the number of cars in wrecks are way down this winter, and I’m able to focus at the new office on getting my work done and everything caught up. 

Here is a test image with the new lens the other day.  I can’t wait to get out and shoot some Texas sized super cells in the next few months.  The field of view is insane.  Right click on the image to view the larger image.

Oh there is the other thing, BNVN, Breaking News Video Network, Inc.  It was bought out by StormChasingVideo.Com last month.  2012 is going to be a good year.