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Monday, September 5, 2011 - 9:22PM CDT

Lightning photo stacks, part II

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.

Finished six more lightning stacks this week (more to be added to this post later). These were much more difficult to blend due to differing white balance and cloud brightness values, but once all of the frames were "normalized" the stacks finally came together smoothly. This first one is a four-frame stack of a CG barrage in Miami, OK on May 9, 2010:

Click to enlarge

Next is a five-frame stack of a northwest flow supercell thunderstorm crossing Route 119 near Julian, WV on May 31, 2009. This storm dropped golfball-sized hail on Huntington, cracking windshields there (see the original chase log):

Click to enlarge

This is a four-frame stack of a storm near Ravenswood, WV on June 4, 2008, one of the first good lightning events I was able to catch with my new (at the time) DSLR: