Even as I’m discovering the rewards of winter photography, I confess that I’m beyond eager for storm season 2009 to arrive. I expect that it will be the year when I finally–finally!–start taking some decent storm photos.
I bought my Canon Rebel XTi with Sigma 18-200mm OS glass in March of this year. Not knowing a thing about DSLR cameras, I naively figured that the automatic settings would make up for my lack of experience. As a result, I made an absolute mishmash of my chase photos. In the extremely low light of some of the storm environments I encountered out west this last May, my camera would refuse to fire at the worst possible moments. Alternatively, the flash would go off, illuminating such fascinating subjects as the rain streaks on the windshield which my auto-focus, in a display of whimsical and sadistic humor, was zeroing in on while ignoring the tornado crossing the road in front of our vehicle at close range. Here”s what I”m talkin” about…
Not exactly everything one could hope for, right?
Please don’t chide me for not spending time getting to know my camera–I thought I had done just that. But the fully manual mode, which could have saved me a lot of grief, was still a mystery to me. So was RAW, and white balance, and bracketing, and anything beyond the basic automatic settings. Nuff said. I got what I got.
Not all of it was terrible, either. If you like wall clouds, I wound up with some cool shots. And at least one tornado photo turned out well enough that you can actually see an elephant”s trunk waaaaay off in the distance, provided you squint and use your imagination.
Still, the Oberlin cone…the small tornadoes circumnavigating the backside of what I think was the Quinter meso…the Hazleton, Iowa, wedge…oh, maaan, the shots I screwed up! I see some of the beautiful images captured by other chasers on Stormtrack, and I’m filled with a mix of admiration and pure-green envy. I could”a been a contender!
But 2009–that’s when I get to redeem myself. I hope. If it”s a good year for storms, and if it’s a good year for me as far as getting to where the storms are, then I think I”ve finally got both the equipment and the basic know-how to put some decent taxidermy in my convective game room. I can”t wait to try!
