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.
Lately I've been spending an hour or so every other day digitizing old analog audio and video tapes. The oldest of those was a cassette of my mom, dad and I when I was 1 year old, the tape of which has remarkably survived for 35 years! There has also been quite a few old train audio clips from the 1980s that I was glad to get digitized for posterity. As for video, the first storm season that I had a camcorder available to shoot storms with was 2000, with a family-owned mid-90s model VHS-C camera that I ended up with that year. The video clip posted above is a compilation of lightning shot during July and August of 2000, mostly in and around Charleston, WV.
Speaking of trains - railfanning is a hobby from childhood that I've mostly abandoned, aside from whenever steam locomotives are running nearby. However, it's interesting to see the popularity of my train videos on Youtube versus storm videos. Here is a selection of a few of my video stats for comparison:
I would have thought that these days, storm videos would have been more interesting to people. It's clear (from Youtube at least) that train videos are not only more popular in general, but are more meaningful to viewers. Maybe I gave up my old hobby too soon.
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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.
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