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I intercepted this supercell shortly after initiation north of Pimrose NE. Followed it south for quite a while. It was always a talker, with lots of thunder. It was just a bit high based and "confused" in if it wanted to go southeast, or south. It would get a new updraft going on its southwest side, and that would try to rotate, but it would always have this other area attached to its east side, not letting that work so well. It was this way for a long time. I've seen that happen plenty of times now, and it never leads to much of anything very interesting. It just annoys a person hoping to see a tornado, as the area to the southwest that cuts in and rotates isn't really allowed to, thanks to the entity on the east side of the storm. I guess it just gets a bit outflow dominant and wants a bit of a 'scoop' to be on that forward flank. Also, on the way to the target a line of storms fired in northern KS, southern NE essentially cutting off inflow winds. There were good surface winds leading up to that point. Anyway, this photo was around its best time. Here on out it kept up with the two "entity" deal. I punched it not long after here, just hoping to find big hail and couldn't even get that out of it. It was moving over the highway, so I creeped west, looking for the whitest looking sky to the north. I nudged into it and not a stone to be found. I did find some nickels punching it a second time south of Fullerton.
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The storm was rapidly croaking, not all that long after that second corepunch, so I started the drive home. As I drove east into Polk, I thought about mammatus behind the storms(there were a bunch of new storms east of here now). Could I beat the setting sun and get out of the rain? Cleared the rain south of Silver Creek, where the rest of these images were taken. The mammatus show was among the best I've seen, maybe the best(at least until the very next night).
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There were big waves of these more intense pouches. All the big updrafts around and to the east create this anvil. Their strength and volume can create some spectacular shows. If you have several intense storms, and especially if they hang out in an area very long, I'd keep an eye out for these. Often they are very hard to see till the sun gets low enough to shine under the anvil.
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Getting brighter thanks to the lowering sun. 10mm view. The mammatus at the top are directly overhead.
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This was looking north. They were like this to the east and to the south, all over the sky.
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South.
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Above. I've now learned what the hardest thing to shoot is...mammatus displays. Sure, shooting one location is easy enough. It's when you constantly look different directions at all these and try to shoot them. Each direction needs a different exposer. To the east you often have brightly lit updrafts, with darker surroundings, so your room for error is small as it is. One has to get that exposure way right on the histogram without going over(get things near blowing out, so that shadow detail has a chance of showing up). Then if you point it west towards the setting sun you have a view with an even larger dynamic range, and one that requires a different exposer. If you point it north or south you often have a scene with a smaller dynamic range, but also requiring a different exposure. So if you are spinning around like mad trying to capture it all, it can be highly annoying fast. If that's not enough, the lighting of the entire scene is changing quickly, as the sun goes down, and as it hides behind clouds and peaks back out. I guess I've just never shot anything that got me so annoyed, even if it was amazing to look at. You are also trying different zoom ranges for composition, and the mammatus are always changing shapes too. Needless to say I shot a ton of pictures during this time, fixing exposures....probably 150 in the 20 minutes I was there. It would really suck to be stuck using film on things like this. Oh yeah, finding a place without poles in all direction is pretty much impossible...especially when the "gravel" roads are all soaked and generally scary(especially scary to a person in a rear-wheel drive car). I hoped to find a cool landscape, but I saw trees ahead and found one decent pull off. I said to myself, just take what you have here and don't miss the whole show looking for something better.
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Taking a pee after all that work. Just kidding(or am I? lol).
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Why am I in the shot, looking like an idiot? I agreed to do an article for something and guess they need me with a storm. Sucks, I tried these, but they actually need my face in the shot, lol. I told Steve Peterson about this on the chase the next day, and mentioned I was just going to take his picture with the storm(they'd never know the difference). He wasn't having it though. |
