Consolation Capture

I had hoped to get shots of night lightning in a towering cumulonimbus cloud on the night of Thursday, July 22, 2010. Our team was playing in a sandpit volleyball game several miles from home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and I was without my tripod. By the time I got home from the game, lower level clouds had moved in obscuring the cumulonimbus cloud, preventing me from capturing the shots I wanted from this location. At this time the western sky began to clear showing off a brilliant planet Venus, allowing me a "consolation" shot at 10:00 PM. Despite the fact that the storm clouds were moving swiftly away from us to our north--canceling severe thunderstorm watches--several counties in eastern Iowa, including this one, were still under a tornado watch. This photo was a six-second time exposure at f/6.3 with an ISO rating of 200.

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Marblehead Morning

Shafts of sunlight break through the clouds along the shores of Lake Erie at Marblehead Lighthouse State Park, Marblehead, Ohio on Monday, July 19, 2010. This photo, taken around 9:00 AM EDT, looks east. At right is the park's namesake, Marblehead Lighthouse. The 50-foot-tall structure, built in 1821, is the Great Lakes' oldest continuously operational lighthouse. The park was our family's first vacation stop of the day before spending the rest of the day at Cedar Point Amusement Park in Sandusky, a little over three miles to the southeast.

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Scud Dud

Shortly after I was assuring a neighbor that no further storms would reach our area in northeast Cedar Rapids, Iowa around 7:00 PM on April 6, 2010, I began to hear thunder and see churning black clouds to our northwest. So much activity that I jumped in my car to take up a storm spotter's position. As I turned north on C Avenue NE from Boyson Road, I saw this very low-hanging cloud about a half-mile ahead of me. I continued driving and eventually stopped at the Echo Hill Presbyterian Church on C Avenue to get a better view of it. Sirens were sounding, but I was not convinced it was a genuine funnel cloud, so I did not phone in a spotter's report. The cloud soon broke up and later weather data determined that it probably was not tornadic, just a scary and unique looking scud cloud. This view looks north on C Avenue as the cloud was drifting over the road from left to right.

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Black Tide Rolls In

An ominous-looking shelf cloud appears to be rolling over on itself as it approaches the water tower in Hiawatha, Iowa just before noon on Friday, June 18, 2010. The shelf cloud was the leading edge of a squall line that produced 40 mph winds, heavy rain and dangerous lightning. The storm was the first of two similar systems that moved through the Cedar Rapids metropolitan area on June 18. This photo was shot from the Fay Clark Park in the city of Hiawatha and looks southwest.

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Frosty, Freezy and Foggy Morning

The sun shines feebly through a winter morning fog as seen from Bowman Woods Park in Cedar Rapids, Iowa on February 23, 2008. This view looks east toward Brentwood Drive NE and was taken around 10:30 AM. The interesting-looking tree in the foreground at left is a European Larch, a tree with needle-like leaves that fall in the autumn (deciduous conifer).

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Rim Shot

The sun rises in a pastel sky above the Painted Desert east of Grand Canyon National Park on the morning of June 3, 1980, as seen in this capture from the canyon's South Rim. Two friends and I had just completed a four-day, three-night backpacking trip in the huge expanse--hiking down the South Kaibob trail from the South Rim, nearly to the North Rim and eventually back up Bright Angel trail on the South Rim--and were preparing to leave northern Arizona at this time for southwestern Utah and Zion National Park.

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Towering Over Us

The edge of a violent storm system looms behind the Nashua, Iowa water tower at 6:45 PM on May 25, 2008. The storm system was actually retreating from this location, which looks southeast from the local Casey's convenience store on Amherst Boulevard. An hour earlier, sirens prompted Casey's employees and patrons alike to go under cover here. The storm system did its worst stuff after 5:00 PM when an EF5 tornado formed in its highly unstable mix then plowed through the towns of Parkersburg and New Hartford about 30 miles to the southwest of Nashua. Nashua is located in the northeastern part of the state, at the junction of US highways 18 and 218, southeast of Charles City.

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