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Tuesday, August 18, 2020

Chicago upward lightning in slow motion during derecho on August 10, 2020

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.

The Midwest derecho on August 10 prompted my first trip outside of the St. Louis area in 5 months. The storm was almost certain to have a large trailing stratiform precipitation region with lightning activity, a prime setup for upward flashes from Chicago's tallest skyscrapers. I left home after 9AM and made it to my newly-scouted setup spot northwest of downtown after 3PM (my longtime Rush University skyline view spot I'd been using since 2006 is gone for good thanks to a new building being constructed across the street from it).

After 9 failed chases to Chicago last year for this subject, this year's first trip (and only one so far) was a success. There were at least 13 upward lightning flash events to the skyscrapers, with four separate instances of triple simultaneous building strikes (Sears, Trump, Hancock). I focused solely on high speed video during the storm, capturing 8 of the upward flashes from the buildings. I published this video to Youtube, which can be viewed below: