Stormchasers (by Ian Plant)

On June 18th, I joined a few friends, including fellow team member Joe Rossbach, at Big Stone Beach on the Delaware Bay. A thunderstorm came rolling in right before sunset, giving us some beautiful light before dumping rain on us. A lot of beginning photographers think that sunny skies offer the best shooting conditions. Not so! Stormy weather is where all the action is (in my humble opinion). While storm clouds can sometimes block all of the light, leaving the sky and landscape a dull gray not worth shooting, sometimes you get lucky and enough light breaks through the clouds to make things interesting. Such are the conditions that I wait for, and such were the conditions that evening on the Bay.

My first exposures were of the mixed warm and cool light bathing the land, water and clouds as the storm moved in. When shooting on the water I always look for strong compositional lines created by incoming and outgoing waves, and I use wide-angle lenses (and sometimes ultra-wide!) to include lots of foreground with lots of sky – such as in this shot:

Shortly after making this image it started to rain, hard and cold. Thinking our evening of shooting was probably over, we started to beat a hasty retreat when the rain suddenly began to ease, as quickly as it had started. The sun bored a hole in the clouds as it neared the western horizon, setting each raindrop ablaze with red light. Conditions seemed perfect for the formation of a rainbow! The rain, however, began again, and I considered seeking shelter under a small clump of trees.  Suddenly, I saw Joe running back to the beach at full speed, waving his arms to get my attention, screaming over the wind “Rainbow! Rainbow!”

What I saw when I turned around got me sprinting as well. Not just one rainbow, but two! A double arc, spreading across the entire sky, with gloomy storm clouds all around. I raced back to the beach, and hastily set up my camera, hoping that the rainbow would not disappear (as is too often the case!). Luck was with us that evening, as the rain stopped and the rainbow shined steady for ten minutes or so. I made a few captures, including this one.

 

 The thunderstorm was still raging to the east of us, so I began to experiment with long exposures in hopes of getting a shot with both a rainbow and a lightning bolt. I set my shutter speed at 4 seconds, and locked my cable release so that the camera would take continuous exposures, one after another. I let the camera shoot for several minutes until finally, during one of the exposures, a bolt of lightning flashed in the sky right near the rainbow.  Mission accomplished!

Chasing storms can be frustrating, and more often than not conditions don’t live up to expectations. But when it all comes together, suddenly it seems worth all the hassle!

Ian J. Plant

~ by mountaintrailphoto on June 22, 2008.