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Almost every year, I try to capture the blossoming of night-blooming cereus flowers in a timelapse video. These cactus vines produce dinner-plate-size flowers in late spring where I live — central Florida — and each flower blooms just once. The aromatic flower begins to open at sunset and closes at dawn.

Some nights, several flowers bloom at once, making a spectacular display. The cactus vine grows up one of our palm trees, and I’m also trying to get it started on our oak after seeing pictures of an oak in Orlando draped with the giant flowers.

For the timelapse this year, I used a GoPro Hero 8 in timelapse mode. I lit the flowers with a simple LED worklight.

Storm chasing can be grueling. Sure, it sounds like a vacation. And it’s definitely a break from the routine of regular life, as the whims of nature guide you to your next destination on the open road. But the constant driving means there’s very little rest. Chasing late into the night precludes regular meals. And laundry is a necessity.

So on May 25, Alethea Kontis and I both needed a break – even as we agreed to keep an eye on the atmosphere for the possibility of storms later in the day. We didn’t want to drive too far to get them. Fortunately, waking up in Liberal, Kansas, offered a perfect opportunity for rest, relaxation — and chasing.

We had a real breakfast, for once, at the Pancake House, a fantastic spot in Liberal, with fellow chaser Bill Hark, who joined us later for some tourism at Dorothy’s House and the Coronado Museum. The museum had a lot of interesting artifacts, and Dorothy’s House offered a snapshot of what an early 20th century prairie house might have been like. (What? Dorothy didn’t have indoor plumbing?) And that big warehouse behind Dorothy’s House with the “Land of Oz” sign that always puzzled me — we found out what it was! It’s where the young woman playing Dorothy gave a one-woman show very much in the wild and weird spirit of The Wizard of Oz, leading us through vignettes inspired by the movie.

After a delicious food-truck hamburger, we had to make a decision. We had reservations in Colby, Kansas, that night, which was at least a couple of hours’ drive north, in hopes of chasing quality storms the next day. Bill decided it wasn’t worth chasing marginal storms to our south and headed out. We opted to take a look at the bubbling CU (cumulus clouds), which I found irresistible.

 
Liberal is just north of the Oklahoma state line, so we dropped into the Oklahoma Panhandle and stopped at Balko to shoot the beautiful, white storms as they blossomed south of us in the Texas Panhandle. We couldn’t resist getting closer.

 
Just north of Perryton, Texas, we captured a gorgeous, colorful sunset and then fantastic lightning, which was almost constant — mostly crawlers and in-cloud bolts but a few cloud-to-ground strikes as well. The GoPro nightlapse in the video is super cool.

 

We finally left the storm to drive north, knowing we’d pay for our chase with sleep deprivation. Still, at Alethea’s urging, we paused in Kansas to see if we might capture sprites. Only it was clear we wouldn’t, because a full moon lit up the prairie with an eerie glow that would have washed out sprites in any photos. Plus, we’re still trying to figure out how to shoot sprites! Still, I captured a meteor in one of my photos. Nothing like a shooting star to end a magical day.

Roll over each picture to see a caption, or click on any one to start a slide show of larger images.

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The 2021 storm season hasn’t yielded a ton of photogenic tornadoes, unless you were around for that April event … and I wasn’t. I go out to the Plains and chase for two or three weeks in the spring, usually in the second half of May. The disadvantage to not living in Tornado Alley is that access to the big storms isn’t easy. But the advantage to a “chasecation” is that all you have to do is chase storms, so you can chase everything, which means you sometimes catch wonderful surprises.

All of this is to say that May 24 actually had one of the most photogenic tornadoes of the season in Kansas, but we missed it. And I didn’t mind all that much, because we saw a spectacular supercell with incredible structure like nothing I’d seen before.

Truth is, that’s one of the appeals of storm chasing: Every storm is like nothing you’ve seen before, only some are more unusual than others. This one qualified.

 
We started the day by retrieving my sunroof hail shield west of Burlington, Colorado, where it had blown off the car in a screaming inflow wind the day before. With it newly secured with several big-ass zip ties, supplementing its heavy-duty magnets, we were ready to chase.

Alethea Kontis and I joined Jason Persoff and Bill Hark, though as usual, we ended up on different parts of the storms for much of the day. Our initial target was what looked like a promising area south of the front in southwest Kansas, where there was some clearing, allowing the sun to heat up the atmosphere and provide fuel for the storms. (The impressive tornado at Selden occurred farther north.) We had to drive through murky fog to get to our target but, in the clear air, were treated to bubbling cumulus and storms in progress.

Our first storm was north of Leoti (where I saw a gorgeous layer-cake supercell in 2016), and it was spinning. It even looked like it might try to put down a tornado, but it couldn’t get its act together. As it went into an area of questionable roads, we went south, east, north and west again to catch up with it. For a moment, northwest of Scott City, it started sucking in inflow and had a big area of serious rotation. I really thought it might drop a tornado – and then the outflow took over, killing the storm’s chances. The bright side: It was gorgeous!

Then it was decision time, and our decision was to go after new storms developing to the southwest. So after more repositioning, we got in front of the storm near Holcomb.

 
This was our storm of the day, thanks to its extraordinary structure – including a highly laminar inflow feature that resembled a shelf cloud (but wasn’t). Sometimes I get too far in front of storms – I’m hail-avoidant, and I love structure. In this case, we almost weren’t far enough from this one. But we got great pictures, stayed ahead of the hail and eventually got south of Garden City to watch it continue its march east. It was tornado-warned, but we didn’t see the reported tornado (this has been the theme of 2021, where you have to be under the meso to lay eyes on quick spinups, even if you’re filming the damn thing the entire time). But it really didn’t matter. This supercell was gorgeous, and a stormy sunset concluded the day.

Roll over a photo to see a caption, or click on one to start a slide show of larger images.

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What an extraordinary day of seeing nature’s magic in action! Alethea Kontis and I started our storm chase on May 17, 2021, in Seminole, Texas, where we watched clouds bubbling on the dryline. Aggressively growing turkey towers (as seen in the video) suggested that storms were in the offing.

Jason Persoff found us by the side of the road. He was chasing with his son Kai, and we all headed north of town to watch the developing storms.

 

The first ones seemed to deflate quickly, but soon a small LP (low-precipitation) storm began to dominate the area around Brownfield. While a nice cone tornado occurred in the line of storms farther south, this one produced what was essentially a dust whirl under a nub of a funnel. Even though we were filming it, we didn’t see the whirling dust – probably because there was so much other dust in the way.

There’s a lot of timelapse in my video, and this spinning storm sometimes resembled a UFO descending upon the Earth.

 

Brownfield literally has a lot of brown fields, and interestingly, their color was reflected in the bases of the storms. So while I always enhance photographs to a point — I’m leaning more toward artistic photos these days rather than the flat, documentary style — those brown and rust colors are pretty much true to life.

 

The storm moved into the south side of Lubbock and produced a long, white funnel that was just shy of stirring up circulation on the ground — i.e., no tornado.

We watched the storm as it became disorganized but still produced a glorious display of convection, lightning and mammatus clouds at sunset. All in all, it was an exhilarating chase day with lots of photo opportunities.

Roll over a photo to see a caption or click on one to start a slide show of larger images.

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May 16, 2021, didn’t start as the most promising of storm chases. Alethea Kontis and I targeted an area southwest of Amarillo and played with pretty storms, photographing falling hail and mammatus. We didn’t see much structure, though, and in search of a break, we stopped at a gas station in Hereford. I thought I saw what looked like a wall cloud on a storm to the south and figured we’d take a look after we finished our rest stop. When we got back in the car, I saw the storm had multiple tornado reports on it – all for one, pretty little tornado.

 
Needless to say, we rushed headlong down to Earth, Texas, to check out the storm. Even on the way, the view was spectacular. The sky filled with bubbly mammatus clouds over a perfect LP (low-precipitation) supercell, spinning madly in the late afternoon light. We found the perfect farm road and photographed and timelapsed the storm until after dark. It was hard to narrow down the photos. And the video is totally mesmerizing.

The storm didn’t produce another tornado, but it was uniquely beautiful, especially with the mammatus, which slid away as dusk fell.

One thing that stays true about storm chasing, even in my twenty-fifth season (yes, you read that right), is that it’s really hard to get enough sleep on the road, let alone enough time to publish all the photos and videos I shoot. We drive constantly, and there’s not a lot of time to sit at a computer for hours processing photos and video. To be brutally honest, I still have some chases for which I’ve never posted the photos in previous years. And this year, though I am doing my best to stay current, I’ve already fallen behind. So although I’m writing this on May 20, I’m dating this post May 16, 2021, which is the day the event occurred.

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On Florida’s Space Coast, we like to say rockets get out of here in a hurry. This GoPro “nightlapse” timelapse makes the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 with Starlink satellites on April 28, 2021, appear to be REALLY fast. In retrospect, it would’ve been nice if the trees weren’t in the way, but the challenge of launch photography is knowing where the rocket is going to come up, especially if you’re shooting from a new location. Yes, you can sort of figure it out, but it’s still possible to be just a little bit off.

It was a really windy night, so the palm trees were blurred in my photos. The moon was just beyond full, so it showed up nicely in the fisheye photo.

In this picture, I played around with stacking just a few photos. That’s the streak shot here with the nice blue background and really short star trails.

Here’s the photo I shot with my 10.5mm fisheye lens. This is one long exposure – 257 seconds – featuring the launch on one side and the moon on the other. I cropped it a little to get the strong horizontal shape.

As much as I love sleep, I always make an effort to get out and shoot pre-dawn rocket launches. If you’re lucky, you’ll get amazing light effects. I saw those this morning, but from my vantage point on the edge of the Indian River Lagoon, the show was partially obscured by clouds. Still, it was pretty.

This was a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with Starlink and SkySat satellites. I shot the streak shot with my Nikon D500, along with the shot showing the booster heading for the drone ship and the rocket continuing its journey. The video is an edited GoPro “nightlapse” that shows the light “jellyfish” blossoming behind the clouds.

 
On May 15, I chased with Mark Robinson, Jaclyn Whittal, Michel Millaire, Matt Grinter, Brad and Dayna Rousseau, Dave Lewison, Scott McPartland and Stephen Barabas. We began the chase on storms in southwest Nebraska, just north of the Colorado line.

While I got some beautiful lightning and enjoyed the chase, the trip “home” to the hotel ended in disaster when I hit a deer in the Middle of Nowhere, Nebraska. It’s a long story, but after the nightmare of dealing with AAA (who eventually lost my car – yeah, I found it again), the police and the crazy scene, I got to a hotel in the wee hours with the help of friends (special thanks to Dan Shaw and Greg Ansel), and my car went into a shop the next day in North Platte. After we found it. Seriously, it’s a long story.

To top things off, I had a horrible cold and spent the weekend worried my car would be totaled. It wasn’t, but it had to be held hostage for repairs. A rental car got me back on the road.

That said, the pictures are nice. Roll over each image to see the caption, or click on one to see a slide show with larger photos.

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I chased on May 27 with Greg Stephens, Dayna Vettese and Brad Rousseau, Mark Robinson and his crewmate Jaclyn Whittal, Scott McPartland, Dave Lewison, Bill Hark and Robert Balogh.

We started our chase near Plainville, Kansas, choosing to ignore the messy rotating storm cluster to our north near the Nebraska border that eventually produced tornadoes. We split up during the chase, which was a fairly typical non-tornado chase – pretty storms but no major drama.

Still, it made for interesting video, especially the mesmerizing time-lapse of the retreating aforementioned rotating storms at sunset.

Roll over a photo to see its caption, and click on any of the pictures to start a slide show of larger images.

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