Home | Blog Index | Blog Archives | Christianity & Faith Essays | Storm Chasing Essays

Saturday, November 24, 2007 - 7:45PM

Rapid leaf shedding and frost

By DAN ROBINSON

Editor/Photographer

From Dan: How the crime of copyright infringement took $1 million from me and brought down my business.

I've lost more than $1 million to copyright infringement in the last 15 years, and it's finally brought an end to my professional storm chasing operation. This page is a detailed account of the biggest threat to my photography and video operation that I had to battle daily to just barely survive, and eventually could not overcome. It's a problem facing all of my colleagues as well.

I was out at daybreak this morning shooting what should be the final stage of the four-season timelapse project, and saw something I'd never seen before. Leaves on a few of the trees were falling off in gobs as soon as the sunlight hit them. Temperatures were in the low 20s with a heavy frost, and as soon as the sun came up, whatever leaves were left on some of the trees were spontaneously falling in large numbers, without any wind or anything to assist the process. It was amazing to watch! I've seen masses of leaves shaken off of trees during strong winds, but never just calmly falling off en masse like they were.

The frost this morning was also impressive, worthy of a few shots.

On a related note, here is another interesting phenomenon I enountered a couple of days ago. This tree in Dunbar has lost all of its leaves, except for a few next to the warmth and light of a streetlight.