Storm Chasing.

I snapped a photo of clouds directly overhead while out for a walk. They a bit menacing, but they looked worse than they turned out to be, as we only had a few spits of rain.

The clouds made for interesting viewing, though.

I didn’t have plans to grab storm shots tonight, as the forecast called for storms mainly west of Tucson. Since we’re in the southeast corner of the city, I figured we’d see some lightning off in the distance that I would find quite beautiful, but not really picture worthy.

Mother Nature likes to keep me on my toes. A small storm cell formed over the east side of the city, about 3-5 miles just to the east of our neighborhood. It didn’t throw out any precipitation, but boy did it give us some great lightning.

Here’s a snap I grabbed within 30 seconds of going out.

And here’s some video I grabbed about two minutes later.

So tonight I used my newest video camera, a Garmin VIRB, to capture lightning over the city of Tucson. The camera did a better job than my older GoPros, but my iPhone 13 Pro still does a better job with the after sunset shots. I’m going to stick to the iPhone 13 Pro for the foreseeable future.

You should be able some of tonight’s shot on my pixelfed.social feed.

Tonight I revived my old Go Pro Hero 3+ and 4. I wanted to see how they’d do during a storm passing through, so at the first indication of lightning tonight I set the Hero 4 up in the driveway on the tripod.

The shots were good, but not great. Here’s an example.

After playing around with the tripod and settings in Photomator, I decided to get my iPhone 13 Pro setup on the tripod and see how that did for the second round of storms that passed through.

I much prefer the shot from the iPhone 13 Pro and will probably stick with that in the future. When mounted on a tripod it does a brilliant job of accomplishing what I’m looking to accomplish.

And that’s beautiful shots of Mother Nature at her best.

I watched this storm gather itself up, inch its way across the mountains, and make its way into the Tucson area. I admired the beauty of this effort for nearly 45 minutes until the rain finally let loose and chased me inside.

Watching and experience a storm is a life affirming experience for me. It makes me feel so alive and at the same time so part of this planetary experience. Mother Nature is a thing of utter beauty, and I’ve felt this energy around thunderstorms since I was a small kid in the bedroom of my folks’ 10×50 trailer (with 8×40 addition) when my sister was young enough to still be in a crib.

Mother Nature is awesome. It’s a privilege to witness her beauty up close.

Here’s a cloud trying to get its act together as a storm. I enjoy the optimism.

While outside of Panhandle, Texas yesterday I did a quick live video on Facebook. Here’s the video.