Photo/video authenticity statement and a description of photo edits
Artificial intelligence (AI) has never been - and never will be - used to create, enhance, edit or otherwise manipulate any of my photographs, videos, scripts or text. My photos and videos were shot on-location with my own equipment, and show real, authentic events as they happened. Many of my best photographs required numerous attempts over many years - at a great expense of time and money - to capture. For example:
St. Louis Gallery: It took ten years and more than 150 attempts to capture my first still photograph of a lightning strike to the Gateway Arch.
Chicago Skyscraper Lightning: It took 8 years of multi-day trips into Chicago (first from West Virginia, later from St. Louis) to capture my first triple skyscraper lightning strike photograph.
New River Gorge Bridge Lightning Gallery: It took 5 years and more than 25 trips on curvy mountain roads from Charleston to Fayette Station, WV to capture my first photograph of a lightning strike behind the New River Gorge Bridge.
To date, my photo galleries represent 426,981 miles of travel over the past 34 years. For decades, before AI even existed, I've been putting in the work and the dedication required to capture these scenes in person as they happen. You can be assured that I'll continue to do the same no matter what technology comes onto the scene.
AI also will never be used to write any of the text content of this site, scripts for my videos or anything I post anywhere online: everything you read and hear was written by me personally.
There are four types of digital edits that have been performed to a select few images (again, no AI has ever been used on any of these):
Wire Removal: Power lines across part of the image were digitally removed usuing manual brush tools and manual single-pixel-level touch-ups (no AI used).
Lightning Stack: A digital composite image consisting of multiple frames taken during a period of time where the camera remained in the same position. On this site, this refers to images of individual lightning strikes during the same storm layered together into a single image, simulating a single long exposure. Stacks are denoted both with a label and an "ST" in the photo's catalog number.
Tornado Panoramic Composite: These are manually-blended composite images showing the stages of development and maturation of a tornado side-by-side in a single image.
Simple Panorama: These are comprised of a series of sequential panning photographs shot at the same time and place in rapid succession, stitched together using a tool to align and merge the individual frames into a single, seamless wide image. The process is similar to how modern cell phones shoot a panoramic photo.
 About the Author: Dan Robinson has been a storm chaser, photographer and cameraman for 34 years. His career has involved traveling around the country covering the most extreme weather on the planet including tornadoes, hurricanes, lightning, floods and winter storms. Dan has been extensively published in newspapers, magazines, web articles and more, and has both supplied footage for and appeared in numerous television productions and newscasts. He has also been involved in the research community, providing material for published scientific journal papers on tornadoes and lightning. |
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