Hurricane Dean from the ISS

Every now and then you see a video so amazing that you kinda step back:





You can hear the chatter between the spacewalker and control in the background. Now try to imagine how mindblowing that must be -- to be out in the blackness of space putting something together with your little space hammer while you coast along at a jolly ol' 17,000mph, when suddenly you see the eye of a Category 5 hurricane zip by 200 miles underneath your feet. Holy cow.



Being an astronaut is fraught with danger, but it clearly is the coolest job in the world and I envy every last one of those guys.

Top of the world in a tempest

Someone asked me where I shot the creepy-looking severe storm photo in my post from yesterday -- the answer is from atop an 8 story parking garage. It's not quite as scary as you'd think (the bulk of the storm had passed), though there's always a slight worry about lightning when you're that elevated near storms. Anyhow, the shot above shows another photographer that was up there snapping away at the storm clouds overhead at sunset. Click to enlarge in a new window.

There Is No Dana

So, we had a severe storm go through Lincoln today...




And this was right after it passed. Looks like Memorial Stadium (where the Huskers play) is a portal to another dimension or something. (Click to enlarge in a new window)



The storm itself was quite wonderful -- golfball sized hail, gusts that were bowing the trees over, typical Nebraska summer stuff. My coworker got caught outside on his break and got a welt on his head from a hailstone. Oh, how I hope I never have to move away from this place.

Local Lincoln Church in HDR

I had to shoot a wedding this past week; I've been going through the shots. I made a point of shooting an HDR of the place (St. Teresa) while I was there. Not quite Notre Dame, but not bad for Lincoln, Nebraska. :)

The Badlands

Ah, the Badlands! A startlingly cool geological oddity in southern South Dakota -- it seems like it belongs in Arizona, not the northern high plains. If you look close, you can see a hawk soaring over the landscape. :) This is a shot from 2002; it was shot on Velvia with a Canon EOS-3 and a Sigma 70-200 2.8EX lens.

Oldie but Goodie

Click to enlarge (huge) in a new window.



This is from an old storm chase last year. Me and Josh were on a supercell near Clay Center Kansas, if I remember correctly, following it north as it dropped several tornadoes. We were on the ass end of it, so while we did get to see the tornado, it was from quite some distance (about 5 or 6 miles), and we never had much chance of catching up to it, mostly because it was moving quickly and we had to, at one point, stop to wait for it to cross the road a couple miles in front of us. (Unfortunately, it was on the other side of the precip that time, so no pics of the tube. I kinda wish we'd stopped and taken a couple snaps of the damage path; it was eerie to see the exploded grain silo scattered across the highway and the lush green farm fields. I made this one extra big for web resolution because it loses a bit of impact when it's tinier. Yes, it's registered at the U.S. Copyright Office. :)



This was taken with a Canon 20D, using a Canon EF-S 10-20mm lens backed out to 10mm. Exposure is 1/100th at f/5, ISO 100.

HDR of a house in Kearney

This is an HDR photo of a home in Kearney, Nebraska. It was assembled with Photoshop CS3 using 9 photographs, each spaced one stop apart, at f/5.6 using a 20D and a Canon 10-22 lens. The shortest exposure was 1/2 second, the longest was 242 seconds.