Storm Highway by Dan Robinson
Weather, photography and the open roadClick for an important message
Storm Highway by Dan RobinsonClick for an important message

30 Years of Storm Chasing & Photography: 1993-2023

By DAN ROBINSON
Editor/Photographer
Important Message 30 Years of Storm Chasing & Photography Dan's YouTube Video Channel Dan's Twitter feed Dan's RSS/XML feed

In 2023, I will pass the 30-year mark in my storm chasing career which started on July 21, 1993. I assembled this page to mark the milestone, remember some of the "old ways" of the activity and show what I consider to be the "catch of the year" in each of those seasons. As of today, I've logged a total of 367,379 miles covering 1,270 separate weather event outings.

On a related note, this web site turned 25 years old back in 2020. A page on that anniversary is here and includes some of the history and older versions of the site going all the way back to the days of Netscape Navigator, Lynx and writing web pages on monochrome Unix university terminals.

I started out as a lightning photographer. The first camera I used for storms was an all-manual 35mm Pentax K1000 SLR with a 50mm and a 28mm wide-angle lens. It was a graduation gift from my grandparents.

One of my favorite books, "All About Lightning" by Dr. Martin Uman, had a section on how to photograph lightning. Once I had the camera, I was anxious to try these tips with the first storms we had. On my first storm outing, I drove to the top of a ridge east of Washington, PA and shot what turned out to be a top-tier lightning show, even by my standards today:

For the first several years I used 100 ASA Kodak print film, which you could purchase at any grocery store. In the film era, you didn't know what you had captured until you took the roll of film to a lab to have it developed. I always took it to a 1-hour lab so I had the shortest wait time possible to see the results from each storm.


Kodak negative of close lighting in 1998

Before the internet/cell phone era, I relied heavily on NOAA Weather Radio for information. I listened to it several times daily (from the Charleston NWS station) on one of my grandfather's old Radio Shack scanners. I would prepare for a night of shooting when they mentioned any chance of storms. That was the extent of my "forecasting" in those first few years. In those days, the broadcasts were recorded by the actual meteorologists on staff, and they would often give close-to-realtime updates on where storms were and where they were headed. So, once I was on the road, I would leave the weather radio going on the scanner for virtually the entire outing.


Lightning photography setup in summer of 2002

A tool that was huge in those early years was my car's AM radio to listen for "sferics" produced by lightning. With AM radio sferics, you could discern the distance and frequency of lightning nearby, even if you couldn't see a storm visually. On many outings, I could use this to tell if a storm was dissipating or maintaining strength, and therefore know whether I should stay out or go home. It was always thrilling to be driving toward a storm while hearing it go crazy with sferics on the radio!

In 2000, I switched to Fuji Sensia 100 slide film, still using the same type of manual SLR camera. It took much longer to get a roll developed (usually a day or two) and only professional photography labs could do it. With print film, you could take the roll to any 1-hour lab at a Walmart or pharmacy, but developing slide film was much more complicated. When I got the slides back from the lab, I had a viewer that I could use to get my first good look at the captures.

If any slides were good enough, I'd take them back to the lab to have 8x12 prints made and/or have them scanned into a digital files so I could post them to my web site. That whole process between capturing the shots and seeing them for the first time in high-resolution sometimes took 2 weeks!

In the early 2000s, I had more access to weather data and radar via the internet at home. Once I was on the road, I was again mostly using NOAA Weather Radio. Though by this time, the broadcasts were more automated and the current updates on what storms were doing became less frequent. By then though, I had several photographer friends (and occasionally family members) who could act as 'nowcasters', in other words, provide me realtime updates on radar and other information via cell phone from their 'home base'. I also spent many an evening at home returning the favor for them when they were out.

In 1999, I joined the Lightning List, an email listserever group dedicated to lightning photography. At the urging of my lightning photography friends I'd made on that venue, I made my first trip to the Great Plains in 2001. I returned each year following and saw my first tornadoes in 2004.


Crossing into a Great Plains state (Oklahoma) for the first time, May 2001

Before 2003 when I bought my first real video camera, I didn't do much with video. The only cameras I had for this were my family's old mid-1990s VHS-C camcorder and my 2000 Fuji Finepix digital point-and-shoot that could take low-resolution AVIs. I didn't take it with me on most outings, and it was difficult to get the video captured into a computer to share online (using a VHS-C-to-VHS adapter, a VCR and an analog capture card). I focused mostly on getting lightning stills in those years.


VHS-C to VHS adapter

In 2002, I started getting regular calls from production companies who had found my web site and were looking for storm footage for shows on channels like Discovery and National Geographic. So, in 2003, I decided to invest in a broadcast-quality video camera (a Sony TRV900) so I would have something to provide for those customers, and thus began my ENG and stock video career. This quickly snowballed: in 2004 and 2005, I shot weather footage for TV nearly full-time and was able to buy a new and better camera each of those years (the Sony VX2100 in 2004 and the Sony HDR-FX1 in 2005). Through this work, I was introduced to the icy road subject, which resulted in the icyroadsafety.com site. The film era ended for me when I bought my first DSLR in 2008, but by then, I had shifted mostly to prioritizing video over stills during most of my weather outings.

30 Years: Best of Each Year: You can click on any of these for a full list of storm chases from that year:

30 Years of Storm Chasing & Photography
Important Message
Dan's YouTube Video Channel
Dan's Twitter feed
Dan's RSS/XML feed

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