Furious Skies

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8-22-07

It's been one extremely wet week! Today at least SOMETHING waited for me to get off of work, albeit not too exciting. Shelfs are a dime a dozen around here, but this one was pretty fascinating. Skies around this area never contain the unreal characteristics as you see down south, so something like this is pretty interesting.

I originally set down to the river to experiment with some timelapse of an updraft. I spotted one going up rather quickly to the southwest, but put it off. Shortly after, a new tower started to go up right behind it. Soon they joined and really took off. I really wish I would have started the timelapse when this occurred, but it's ok. This storm actually went on to be quite impressive apparently with some gusty winds and very heavy rain. It was pretty neat to see it go from this simple little cumulus puff in the sky to a towering updraft a little while later. Here's a quick clip I just uploaded. The only reason why I went with TinyPic this time is because YouTube seems to cut off the last second or so of every video. Normally that wouldn't be that big of a deal, but since this was a short clip I wanted it all on there.

Here's a shot of the tower as it drifted off of the frame. Not very well contrasted, exposed, or in focus, but I'm not a great photographer either.

As I was shooting this, I noticed a shelf-like structure to the north/northwest. Before I left the house, there was just a few piddly storms on the radar. This was somewhat a surprise. I love the white contrasting with the dark background on these types of shots. Usually with shelfs this will happen. This was so much cooler to witness in person.

I'm still trying to figure out how the upper part of this shot is so blown out. It wasn't this bright and I was using AE lock on every shot.

This is what I thought looked really cool. This was the south end of the shelf. It had a nice rounded edge and even had a few striations. Even though this isn't much at all to 99% of the people who actually read this, it's still nice to see something halfway decent around here.

The "teeth" were racing straight at me here. It was really, really moving. Now THIS would have made an incredible timelapse. I wish I had two cameras. Also, that green algae on the river is a rarity. I have never seen it before. I saw it when I left for work this morning and thought it was really strange. Later on in the night I learned it was from some backwaters flooding up north.

Whale's mouth now starting to show itself.

As it came up over my head, I got another surprise...the wind! I would guesstimate around 40-45 mph considering some trees were down throughout Rapids City and Port Byron. Power was actually knocked out for about an hour.

As the whale's mouth came in, it was churning pretty rapidly. It was quite a short little display.

Show is just about over. I had to up the ISO to 800 since it was getting pretty dark. It was much darker than this picture actually shows.

I'm not even sure why I was taking pictures after the main stuff had passed, but I managed to squeeze out another daytime lightning shot. I still don't know how I did it considering the bolts were extremely fast. Blink and you'd miss one. Got lucky I suppose.

As night approached, there was quite a light show, but to be completely honest I'm getting kind of burnt out on lightning this year. I know I'll be missing it when winter comes, but unless I can get some very close shots, I just can't get motivated anymore to get out. But, I was already out and about so I decided to stop for just a bit and try to get a few. Only one showed itself and it was an anvil crawler. The majority were tucked behind the rain shafts. Like I said, this entry isn't much...at ALL...just something a bit different to break up the lightning entries.

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