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Strong storms started early on August 13. By 1:30 p.m., when I was in Satellite Beach, a magnificent shelf cloud was bearing south.

Beachgoers took their time to leave the beach in the face of the ominous arcus cloud. I couldn’t resist waiting for it and shooting as many photos as possible, given its delicate layers.

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On July 6, this was one of those chases that materialized when, vaguely aware that a bunch of storms were forming in central Florida, I looked out the window and saw a nice shelf cloud (arcus cloud) forming. After muttering several words I can’t print here, I grabbed my camera and raced out the door to get into position.

First stop: the east end of the S.R. 520 bridge, looking back west at Cocoa. From there I went to Cocoa Beach and then Satellite Beach, marveling at how the delicate light and color of the layers in the cloud changed as it raced east toward the beach (and I hit every freaking red light in Merritt Island).

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While I have many projects in the works – producing videos, writing a novel, helping a client publish a book – I’ve been shooting tons of photos recently. The subjects have ranged from a pinup to a sugar artist to a newspaper preview of Epcot’s International Food and Wine Festival. But as always, I’m drawn to nature, especially weather. And when the weather doesn’t cooperate – I’m still waiting for a great nighttime lightning storm here – there are sea turtles!

I recently accompanied storm chaser Peggy Willenberg and her friends, experts on turtles, as they roamed the east central Florida beaches one evening looking for nesting sea turtles. Our target was the Floridana Beach area, north of Sebastian, a popular area for turtles. We saw perhaps ten that night, under the full moon – at least when it stopped raining. We went out in a light rain just after dark. White light and flash photography should not be used when observing turtles, so all of these photos were taken in almost complete darkness with only the help of the full moon. The shoot was incredibly challenging. A red light is OK, and one of my friends had one, but it was rarely used. So focusing was almost impossible. (Next time, I’ll bring a red light to assist with focus.) We saw a couple of turtles early in our search, and then, after a lull, saw several more until we stopped about 1:30 a.m.

There was something magical and primal about these beautiful creatures emerging from the ocean to do what they’ve done for thousands of years, and I did my best to capture the experience. See more photos below.

Note: This post has been updated with the gallery that originally appeared on SkyDiary.com.

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It was a beautiful evening, with the full moon rising over the ocean and storms heading out to sea.  I set up the camera to shoot automatically while chatting with friends at one of their oceanfront condos (man, I’d love to have that perch for photography all the time!).  The bad thing about that is, when the rain started spitting again, I wasn’t there to wipe off the lens. So while I got a handful of cool shots with lightning, the ones with raindrops were pretty much unlovable. I did my best to repair them, but after a while, they start to look like Impressionist paintings. (Maybe that’s not all bad.)

All that said, the photo above was taken after I’d wiped off the lens. The contrast wasn’t high, as the bolt lit up the cloud/precipitation in the air, and the ocean was pretty dark, but I like the subtlety. Also, I wanted to post it here because the social media outlets, like Facebook and Twitter, always make photos with this kind of subtle light look like crap. I realize the services are compressing them, but it still makes me a bit frustrated.

Want to see more storm photos from this year, including tornadoes? Check out the storm reports – as always, a work in progress.

 

I’m busy trying to meet several work deadlines before heading out west to Tornado Alley, but the east coast of Florida has provided some welcome distractions for a storm chaser this month. We’ve had shelf clouds and lightning, though the lightning was a bit sparse. Let’s just say I spent several hours clicking the shutter for the little bit I got.

Still, there’s nothing more therapeutic than standing by the ocean, listening to the waves and thunder, while trying to capture a lightning bolt with my camera. Check out all the April storm photos below.

Stay tuned – the Tornado Alley chase is coming soon!

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It’s been about a year since I chased tornado-warned storms in central Florida. This is one of the most popular videos on my YouTube channel. Of course, I didn’t see any tornadoes, but there was some awesome cloud structure on March 29, 2014, that sure looked like one for a minute.

It’s been mostly quiet in east-central Florida so far this year, with a little severe weather passing through last week. Even in Florida, we’re feeling the effect of a long, cold winter – only here it’s cool and beautiful!

My chaser friends are starting to buzz about the season to come. Will there be an early burst of activity in May? Will the more serious severe weather pattern kick in later? Now the suspense begins. I’ll be posting updates here and at SkyDiary.com, my storm-chasing site, as I chase storms in Florida and in Tornado Alley. Stay tuned.

Storms in Brevard County, Florida, on August 9 grew strong quickly, forming scalloped shelf clouds and dumping prodigious amounts of rain.

Rain forced me to cancel a portrait shoot, so I dashed across the Indian River Lagoon and shot the storm coming in over Cocoa, Florida, at 5:02 p.m.

I got ahead of the storms by rushing to Merritt Island and shooting back east at Cocoa, then continuing east to Cocoa Beach and ultimately Port Canaveral. 

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One of the reasons I moved to Florida in 1999 was to enjoy the lightning storms. I was living in the mid-Atlantic and had gotten into chasing storms in Tornado Alley two years earlier. I looked into moving to Oklahoma, but career and geography conspired to bring me to Florida. The one thing I didn’t realize was that so few of the lightning storms in the Sunshine State are at night. Most happen during the day. And getting to a storm an hour away in Florida is not nearly as easy as getting to one in Tornado Alley. Why? It’s not just because of the traffic and road network. It’s because Florida storms tend to be short-lived; by the time you hit the road to catch that storm 45 miles away, it’s faded to a misty memory.

This past week was par for the course – and the one night a little lightning hung on after dark on the east coast, where I live, I didn’t get to it until it was nearly gone. But I’ve had a crazy smorgasbord of storms upon which to feast, yielding a nice photo or two almost every day. Florida has amazing striated shelf clouds, formed by cool air pushing out from thunderstorms. And boundary collisions tend to cause quick funnels and tornadoes; I was at a small get-together at a friend’s house when a funnel cloud (not a tornado, because it didn’t connect with the ground, at least that we saw) formed beyond their neighbors’ houses. My camera got soaking wet as I ran out in the rain in my bathing suit to try to shoot photos. What a week!

Meanwhile, I’ve been working late on revisions and editing of “Zap Bang,” the final novel in the Storm Seekers trilogy. I’m thrilled to be wrapping up the story and heartbroken to be leaving these characters. It’s coming very soon!

A note for e-mail subscribers: I am phasing out the Feedburner e-mail service, since Google no longer supports it and I can no longer access it. Please use the link to the right on my site to sign up for the new e-mail list; if you get two copies, please unsubscribe from the Feedburner e-mail. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but I’m at the mercy of the vagaries of the mega-corporation.

A line of storms formed in east-central Florida on July 14, pushing out an outflow boundary that created a beautiful striated shelf cloud.

I shot photos of it over Cocoa Village, in downtown Cocoa, and then raced east to catch it again at the Cocoa Beach Pier.

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Nature paralleled the unnatural on Wednesday, July 9, 2014, when a beautiful striated shelf cloud moved over Cocoa, Florida, the Indian River Lagoon and the bridge over the S.R. 520 Causeway. It originated from a barely-moving severe storm farther west that sent out an outflow boundary. The shelf cloud almost mirrored the curve of the bridge as it went overhead.  This was a “gentle(wo)man’s chase,” just a few miles from home, as I followed the slow-moving line of severe storms.

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