Monthly Archives: August 2013

Golden Skies and the #WayBackMachine

August 29, 2013 by ScottWood | 2 Comments
Golden Skies

I am a little ashamed to say that I have been neglecting this blog over the last couple weeks.  Truth be told, I haven’t really had a lot of free time to get out and do any shooting.  Over the last 3 weekends I have made road trips to Idaho to celebrate a wedding with my family.  I know, 2 trips in 3 weeks seems like a lot, but it is even odder when you consider that it was for the same wedding. :-)  In any case, I wanted to do a quick share of this image, Golden Skies, which I shot a few years ago in Arizona but recently came across again when I was cleaning up my Lightroom catalogs.  I hope you enjoy it.

Posted in Photography, WayBackMachine

The #WayBackMachine and a perfect storm

August 19, 2013 by ScottWood | 1 Comment
The Perfect Storm

I haven’t shared a #WayBackMachine image in a long time, and for those that don’t know, these are posts that share an image that I have previously shared, but thought would be worth sharing again.  In this case it is an image from back in Aug. 2010 of what I felt was almost a perfect storm while out storm chasing in the Arizona desert.

My wife and I had been out chasing all day, these great thunderstorms kept popping up all over the valley.  They were all very isolated and very fast.  I don’t think any of them ever hit the severe warned state, but I could be wrong about that, but in any case almost all of them were simply gorgeous and it was fascinating to watch them build and then break up so quickly.  This image, captured just a little north of Florence, AZ was one of those storms.  We were heading south when this scene started to develop right before my eyes.  I slammed on the brakes, pulled off the highway and grabbed a camera.  I ended up shooting something like 8 different rainbows that day, but this one is far and away my favorite rainbow I have ever shot.

How can you not love having a rainbow, a downpour rain shaft and blue skies all in the same image?

Posted in Photography, WayBackMachine

Lightning Farm

August 14, 2013 by ScottWood | 3 Comments

Lightning Farm

The storm chaser in me really does wish that there were a farm out that that grew lightning strikes, but in the meantime I guess I will have to settle with lightning striking a farm :-)

This image was from my recent storm chasing trip to Arizona and is actually from the same location as this one from a recent blog post.

Posted in StormChasing

A Vintage Dust Storm

August 6, 2013 by ScottWood | 1 Comment
Into The Dust

Today’s blog post takes us back a couple years to July 4th, 2011, one day before the now famous haboob hit the metro Phoenix area.  This dust storm was in the Casa Grande, AZ area and pretty much died out before it could get to the Phoenix area, by most scales it was quite small, and while it might look very large in this image it was just that I was VERY close to it when I grabbed this shot.

This shot was actually a single still image out of a sequence I captured for a time lapse video that evening.  This was back in the time that I was still shooting JPG for time lapse due to card size limitations.  If you look closely at the image you might see a good amount of JPG artifacts from the processing that I needed to do to the JPG file to get it to look close to the way I wanted the final image to present.

Typically I share these older images as #WayBackMachine posts, but since this is a previously unshared image I am simply classifying it as “Vintage.” :-)

Posted in StormChasing

Field Lightning

August 5, 2013 by ScottWood | 1 Comment

Field Strike

Today’s blog post takes up back to my recent storm chasing trip in Arizona.  I titled this image, and the post “Field Lightning” for the simple reason that I was in a field, it is of a field and the lightning came in in the field, pretty creative isn’t it.? :-)

I really debated whether or not I was going to share this image or not, there are a few things about this image that I really love, the fact that it was shortly after sunset meant that there was still just a little bit of color in the sky to add interest, and I also loved having those huge field sprinklers in the shot to show that I was in an agricultural area of town.  The one thing I am not really happy with is how blown out the lightning strike was.  I had been shooting lightning for about 15 minute prior to this image, all of which were quite a ways away from me and the exposure was dialed in pretty well for those.  This strike was MUCH closer than any of the ones I had shot prior to this one and that lead to this one being over exposed.  I was able to recover the shot and got this, which is still an image that I am happy with.

If you are curious as to how I recover lightning images that are overexposed and blown out, I have a tutorial online, please check it out.

Posted in StormChasing