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Wednesday, June 11, 2008 - 10:27PM

Lightning 100 miles away

By DAN ROBINSON

Editor/Photographer

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

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.

With a ridge of high pressure overhead, dewpoints in the 50s, clear skies at sunset and Charleston completely out of the SPC's thunderstorm outlook, the last thing I thought I'd be doing tonight was shooting lightning. Counting the runs from the ridgetop back down to the house to get a memory card and again for a can of insect repellent, total mileage tonight was about 1/5 mile, on foot! A chase where I never start the car is always welcome. The Virginia storms lasted well past sunset, when they put on the expected show of clear-air lightning bolts. They were very sporadic, and due to the short dusk exposures and my camera's buffer continually filling up, I missed the best ones. I did come away with a few keepers though.

Radar (see my last post) showed these storms just north of Wytheville, Virginia in the Bland County area. My vantage point was on the ridge in Spring Hill Cemetery in Charleston, just behind my house.