Archives

August 1 offered one of those local chases that would have been better if I’d been about an hour’s drive to my west. But we’d just had dinner in Cocoa Beach and watched the storms going up as twilight deepened into night, and I had a feeling if I attempted the drive, I’d never get into position.

So I opted for a wide view instead and got some pretty structure shots as the moon set behind the storms filling the western night sky. I filmed a GoPro “nightlapse” timelapse from Rockledge and shot photos, too. The video is pretty as the moon descends behind the flashing lightning storm and planes zoom around it, with sprinklers dancing in the foreground.

Our house got none of the rain. It’s the driest summer I can remember here on the east-central Florida coast. Memory is not a great scientific measurement, but let’s just say the plants are really unhappy. This summer doesn’t feel like subtropical Florida.

I’ll admit it: I’m a lazy Florida chaser. Here’s the thing about Florida storms — most garden-variety Florida storms (not the rare supercells we get, mostly in winter and early spring) pop up and die within thirty minutes. FOR REAL. In the Plains, if you see a storm a hundred miles away, it might actually still be going by the time you get there. Here, it will be long gone.

The other thing about Florida is trees. Yes, a lot of the state — especially from central Florida north — is covered in trees. So even though we don’t have many hills getting in the way of our views, trees are confounding.

The best way to chase storms in Florida is to dedicate entire days to hanging out in the center of the state waiting for sea-breeze boundaries to collide and chasing whatever pops up from these and subsequent storms formed on boundary collisions. But since I’m usually working on other stuff, I don’t often have that luxury. That’s why, when a nice lightning storm or shelf cloud materializes in my area and I have enough notice and time to get to it, I’ll dash out the door and take my chances. If I actually get on a good storm, then I can be quite obsessive about squeezing every last lightning bolt out of it, but those occasions are rare.

Today was one of the good days. Hubby texted me on his way to the grocery store that there was a nice shelf cloud to the north. I wasn’t even paying attention, but WOW, was I thrilled when I went outside to look. The shelf represented an outflow boundary from storms to the north. By itself, it wasn’t violent or dangerous, but boy, was it dramatic.

My first stop was just up the river road in Rockledge, looking north toward Cocoa, where I saw a piece of the shelf cloud looming over the Indian River Lagoon. From there, I went south to the old Harvey’s citrus plant location and took some shots, then to the extreme southern end of Rockledge (the River Rocks parking lot) to let it overtake me. It was so, so beautiful, I took a ridiculous number of photographs.

A note about my photo editing: I used to be much more of a stickler for documentary photographs. I didn’t do much to enhance contrast and color, just a bit of work and a decent crop. But I’ve become more forgiving and have learned to let my creativity guide me. I’m not faking anything, but I am embracing enhancements of natural colors and bumping up clarity and contrast so you get the feeling I get when I look at the storms. I take a more artistic view. I even occasionally remove power lines (one of these photos has power lines removed, as marked).

Storm chasers have different styles when it comes to photo edits. I’ve noticed a trend toward super-dark edits. Some crank the clarity (a Lightroom/Photoshop setting) to extreme levels. I hope I strike a balance between nature and art. I was thrilled with this storm and these photos. Enjoy.

Roll over any image to see a caption, or click on a photo to start a slide show.

Wordpress Photo Gallery

The show is almost over. The last few night-blooming cereus blossoms are maturing on our cactus vines, which climb a palm tree and our front porch. I’m also trying to start one in our live oak after seeing photos of a dazzling display in Orlando.

What am I talking about? The dinner-plate-size flowers that each bloom for just one night. Here in central Florida, they start blooming in May.

This year, as I do every year, I shot timelapse video of the flowers opening. Only this time, I included it in a three-minute documentary about the blooms. It pretty much says it all. These delicate dancers of the night live their best life when most creatures are asleep.

See the video above, or click on any of these images to start a slide show.

Wordpress Photo Gallery

I’m literally on the eve of heading to Tornado Alley for the annual storm chasing trip, which means I dropped my Honda CR-V at the dealership for an oil change. Hubby picked me up, and I immediately saw that the fast-growing cumulus tower I’d been watching had something under it – a funnel cloud! The late, great chaser Jim Leonard always said to look for waterspouts under such clouds.

The funnel, which I first saw at 11:10 a.m., persisted, proving itself a legitimate funnel. But was it a tornado? Or perhaps a waterspout? We were in Cocoa, Florida, driving east toward the Indian River Lagoon. When we finally got through all the traffic and trees and stores to the riverbank, the funnel was in the last moments of roping out.

Later, the National Weather Service office in Melbourne confirmed they had a report of a waterspout by the 528 causeway. So it did “touch down,” but not on land. That said, it looked tornadic to me. My chaser friends say I should count it as this season’s first tornado.

Regardless of what you call it, this was a pretty rare sight for this part of Florida. It didn’t look like much on radar, but the funnel just proves that surprises happen all the time. Here’s the video.

All of a sudden I’m caught in a whirlwind of preparations for storm chasing and probably leaving much earlier than I’d thought. Alethea Kontis and I will discuss our options and may be hitting the road later this week.

Work obligations have prevented me from leaving Florida so far this year. It’s always hard to miss big events like the mind-blowing Andover, Kansas, tornado, but that’s the way it works when you don’t live in Tornado Alley and can’t chase every day. And the thing a lot of people don’t understand about storm chasing is that even if you ARE out on a particular day, there’s an excellent chance you won’t see the “storm of the day.” There are a million variables, and luck plays as much of a role as skill.

Believe me, I could fill a book with missed opportunities and bad choices. Sometimes even when you think you’ve made a great choice, ten minutes later you see someone else’s video of the same tornado and want to cry because you weren’t in the same position. The healthiest thing to do is not worry so much about it … but we can’t help a little comparisonitis.

Anyway, I’m testing and preparing gear and sorting out equipment that hasn’t been used for some time. I’m also testing the only new purchase I allowed myself for this year’s chase – a GoPro Hero 10. This video is a timelapse filmed in “night lapse” mode with the Hero 10. I had a lot of luck with beautiful lightning night lapses like the one in this video, filmed on a Hero 8, during last year’s storm chase. I also expect to use this as a dash cam.

For now, here’s the video of night falling at Port Canaveral, Florida, with swirling clouds and the colorful lights of Exploration Tower, seen reflected in the water. I had to do a little processing to minimize noise in the image. Partly I think the noise is a product of me shooting at a more zoomed-in “narrow” view because I was shooting through a deck railing and even had to crop the video a bit in the edit. My experience with GoPros is that shooting wide and cropping in later (if necessary) produces a higher-quality image. But I still think this is a very pretty and meditative little video.

See you on the road soon!

We have a bat box in our neighborhood, at Rockledge High School, and every evening – just about the time the first star (or planet) appears in the sky – the bats plunge from their box and take flight. We certainly have plenty of mosquitoes for them to feast on this spring, especially after all the rain we’ve had over the weekend.

Tonight I shot a little video with my iPhone of hundreds of bats dropping out of the box. This is just a fraction of the bats who come out each night. The new video is above.

What? You want more bats? Here’s a video I shot in 2018 with a better quality camera.

 
My getaway weekend in Miami Beach at the 2022 Miami Rum Congress was interrupted by a wild windstorm this afternoon. As a cold front pushed a line of storms through Florida, already intense winds were whipped into a frenzy and bowled through the big tasting event at the Hilton Cabana in Miami Beach.

The rum tasting was split between two locations, one at the semi-outdoors bar adjacent to the pool and the other under a big tent on the deck on the third floor. The canopy of the tent acted like a sail, flapping wildly in the high winds as brave rum folk and hotel employees attempted to secure it.

The distillers shut down amazingly quickly and, with teamwork, eventually got the canopy off the tent frame, as you can see in this video. They reset, and the tasting resumed in a ballroom indoors. What a crazy afternoon!

Why yes, there was another holiday parade today between Rockledge and Cocoa, this one landlocked (see previous post for photos from the boat parade). It had all the charming elements one wants from a Christmas parade: fire trucks and miscellaneous municipal vehicles, kids marching, dancing, shouting and riding on floats, and candy thrown at spectators.

I especially enjoyed seeing my awesome in-laws riding their trikes while holding their adorable papillons. Decorated, of course – the tricycles and the dogs.

This is a short video roundup that will give you the (sweet) flavor of the event. I shot this in Cocoa Village, Florida. Happy holidays!

Our town is so small, it usually has joint events with the town next door. In July, it’s fireworks. In December, it’s parades, on land and on the water. Friday night it was the Rockledge-Cocoa (or Cocoa-Rockledge) Christmas boat parade, and it was kind of adorable.

If you’re not familiar with this phenomenon, people dress up their boats with lights and inflatable decor (picture giant polar bears) and set out on the Indian River Lagoon for an extremely short trip between Rockledge and Cocoa, Florida. Other towns have this, too – I once had the experience of riding on a boat in the Cocoa Beach boat parade, and while it was interesting, it was longer than most operas. It’s fine from the shore, where everyone was having parties, but on a boat, especially a boat without a bathroom, it can feel rather endless.

But I digress. The Rockledge-Cocoa parade is not endless. It’s short and sweet. In Rockledge, several people gathered at the municipal dock on the historic river road next to the Indian River Lagoon to watch. Here are a few photos I snapped of the experience.

Wordpress Photo Gallery

A beautiful “mackerel sky” greeted us here on Florida’s Space Coast this afternoon. Like the scales of a fish, these altocumulus clouds create a fluffy pattern across the blue.

I set up the GoPro to film a short timelapse of these clouds as they moved across the sky, right up until sunset.