In September of 2025, my work is generating the most income it ever has in my career. Yet, I'm being forced to shut down my successul operation, against my will, due to one cause alone: 95% of that revenue is being stolen by piracy and copyright infringement. 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. Do not be misled by the lies of infringers, anti-copyright activists and organized piracy cartels. This page is a detailed, evidenced account of my battle I had to undertake to just barely stay in business, and eventually could not overcome. It's a problem faced by all of my colleagues and most other creators in the field.
This post is a work in progress - new sections will be added as the month progresses and I get time to update it. The post will be "officially" published on June 1.
Lightning (not tornado) potential for May 8 was enough to get me on the road for a one-day Plains chase to central Kansas. I departed at 11PM Friday night the 7th, arriving in Salina at 7AM. After a nap, I slowly made my way west and south to LaCrosse as storms began firing. Two cells emerged initially, with the northern one ultimately taking over and drifting northeast. I initially was south of the storm, then chose to go north to I-70 to move ahead of it as it crossed the interstate. I accomplished this at Ellsworth. The storm was a prolific CG producer, and put on quite a show with lightning and sunset colors near Salina. I stayed ahead of the storm on the interstate all the way to Topeka, making several stops for high speed lightning shots. Nearly every DSLR exposure caught lightning.
2-frame panorama
3-frame stack
The storms eventually congealed into a large squall line, so I spent several hours in Topeka trying for upward lightning off of one of the TV towers west of town. Intracloud and cloud to ground lightning was nearly continuous from the main cores to the south and the stratiform region overhead, but no upward flashes occurred to the towers. I did get some nice audio recording of the thunder here. Radar showed that a much larger stratiform precip area was heading for Kansas City, so I decided to head east to set up at the towers east of downtown KC. When I arrived, however, a solid deck of low clouds had moved in behind the cold front, enshrouding the upper two thirds of the towers in the clouds and completely blocking the view of any upward lightning. I ended up calling the chase at this time, heading east to Booneville to stop for the night. I made it home Sunday afternoon.
The following video includes all of the DSLR stills from this chase, along with several bolts captured on the high speed camera (which I had set to record at 6,000 frames per second).
Web Site Design and Internet Marketing by CIS Internet
From Dan: Please Read
To my regular readers, I offer my apologies for this heavy-handed notice. Unfortunately it has become necessary, so please bear with me!
Please don't copy/upload this site's content to social media or other web sites. Those copies have been a critical problem for me, seriously harming this site and my photography/storm chasing operation by diverting traffic, viewers, engagement and income. "Credit" and "exposure" does not benefit this site or my operation, rather they threaten my ability to cover my operating expenses. Please read my full explanation for this notice here.
Before continuing, check each box to agree to and acknowledge these two statements:
Click this button to finalize this acknowledgement:
