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Sunday, December 9, 2012 - 4:52AM CST

December 9 lightning in Missouri and Tennessee

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.

12 for 12! Tonight I completed the unprecedented "Lightning photos every month in 2012" streak with these storms in southeast Missouri and northwest Tennessee. I also captured a couple of "lightning and Christmas lights/decorations" compositions, another first! Here are some of the images (click for larger versions). Despite a slight chance for lightning here at home in the St. Louis metro, I chose to maximize the opportunities for success by playing farther south where instability would be greater, down in the Missouri bootheel region.

Click images for larger versions

At first, dense fog across all of southeastern Missouri threatened to obscure the storms above it. That turned out to not be an issue thanks to the storms' winds mixing out the stagnant saturated layer at the surface. This first shot is from near Obion, Tennessee (just north of Dyersburg), just a minute after the fog cleared.

Next was this frequent CG barrage near New Madrid, MO. I sacrificed a couple of good bolts over open fields in order to get some "lightning with Christmas decorations" shots: