The year of 2023. I changed the storm photography approach a bit. You see… Driving for hours in hope a storm will form where I drive to is great. Storms, however, are notoriously unpredictable. They rarely form where I am. Unless if a cold front is rolling through the landscape. In that case it’s easier to predict.
I therefore decided to take more photos locally. To me, of course.
I stumbled across the first one by accident. I was near a place called Kresnice on an old jetty I go to visit sometimes. I was enjoying the roar of the rapids while trying to find a photo I didn’t take before. Which isn’t really easy because it’s a messy location from photography standpoint. While I was trying to find a fresh photo I heard something like thunder.
I thought it was really odd for the beginning of April so I shrugged it off. But a minute or so later, I heard it again.
I’m sure someone was able to see the clouds. My location, however, prevented me from seeing a lot of the sky, I was located at a side of a hill after all. I had to resort to looking at the weather radar data and I actually saw a small storm cell nearby.
Even though I really wanted to drive off to a better location, I stayed where I was. My patience was rewarded when the sun started to shine through the hole in the storm clouds. The sunrays were hitting the rain from the side making it glow orange.
It was a lovely start to the 2023 storm season. I was waiting patiently for the next one. And what a wait it was! Two months have passed until the next time I went to take photos of a storm.
I went to Prekmurje, of course. 2 hours drive from my primary location. So much for shooting locally…
When I got there I was greeted by a lovely breeze in an otherwise hot day. There were some clouds in the sky, but they didn’t look like stormy ones. Sure, they would bring a storm. But not to where I was. I therefore went for a nice walk instead of storm chasing. The fields were lovely and there was also some nice light from time to time. Even the photos turned OK. No storm, but still…
This was the first scene I saw when walking around. The sunrays breaching the clouds were nice enough. They were also pointing vaguely towards the church. A beautiful sight I enjoyed looking at for some time and even took a photo.
The one thing about the location I chose is it’s all flat. There’s not a hill around for many kilometers. Sunrises and sunsets are usually quite scenic but I wouldn’t call it an exciting landscape.
I can’t stress how excited I was to find these three blossoms in the wheat field. It was really lovely to find something to put in the bottom of the photo and using a wide angle lens to put everything else in the frame.
Was it easy to keep it somewhat clean? No. There were a lot of distractions, but I managed to avoid them mostly by moving around for 10 minutes.
With the night closing in, I headed back towards my campervan. It wasn’t the most exciting walk with everything being flat and straight, But I still enjoyed the coolness of the late evening, a slight breeze and the shapes that lights from the passing cars were making in the fields.
I asked myself why I shouldn’t try to capture the flatness. As I couldn’t really find a smart reason, I grabbed the tripod, put on the camera and started searching. And avoiding a few cyclists that were looking at me a bit sideways.
This is the photo I came up with. All flat and straight with remnants of a storm in the sky. And some light trails from the passing cars.
The biggest hurdle were the cars driving towards me. Their headlight made a complete mess of quite a few frames.
Even thought the storm wasn’t there, I really enjoyed just walking around looking at what nature and humas had to offer and trying to capture something.
Similar to the two previous attempts, another two months passed before I went to chase a storm again. That time, however, it was completely different. It was what I was trying to do in 2023. Doing it locally.
August 1st. It was a warm summer day. I was outside doing stuff. The weather forecast was stormy. A had one eye on the weather radar data, the other on the stuff I was doing. Once the storm was quite close to my location, I had a hard time gathering motivation.
It is like that sometimes. It seems too hard to gather photo equipment, to get in the car and to start driving. I even had a location in mind 10 minute drive from where I was. I was deciding for so long, the sound of the distant thunder reached me.
That was motivation enough. I threw everything in the backpack and rushed towards the location.
Ten minutes later I arrived. The tree was still there, of course. The valley view was also there. And the storm was coming towards me.
I spent maybe 10 additional minutes trying to find a good composition. I always wanted to take a photo of a mighty tree with lightning above in the sky. Preferably with a stunningly dramatic cloud all around.
Quick check showed it wasn’t going to be such a photo. When I was getting closer to the apple tree I saw it just wouldn’t work. I went back up the side of the hill which took me one whole minute.
The storm was moving towards me from the west. It looked awesome. Dramatic clouds and even some good lightning in the distance. I estimated the distance to some 5 to 10 kilometers. But there was also lightning and thunder much, much closer at times. I estimated the distance to closer to 1 kilometer.
Estimating the distance isn’t that difficult, as you might know. The light travels so fast, we can basically forget about the time it takes to travel to our eyes. The sound on the other hand travels with approx. 343m/s. If we start counting second as soon as we see lightning, we only need to multiply number of second with 350. It’s a bit rounded to make it easier. 3 second difference means the lightning was approx. 1050m away. If we see lightning and hear thunder at the same time we know we’re having a great time. And that it might be a good idea to try not to get fried.
With that out of the way… The closer thunder wasn’t coming from west as I expected, but from the north. It almost looked like another storm was brewing much closer. There were even some raindrops from time to time.
Knowing there was another storm closer made me think about how exposed I was at the side of the hill. I was thinking about that while I was holding a great big aluminium stick in a shape of a tripod.
Why was I holding a tripod? It was a bit windy and I didn’t want my camera to take a tumble. But why did I have it there during the day?
Taking a photo of a lightning is a numbers game in my mind. The longer I can have the shutter open with as wide focal length as possible, the more chance I have to actually catch lightning. It’s usually far easier to see it that to take a good photo. Or any photo at all.
I was using Tokina 11mm-16mm lens that day. I tried stopping it down to a few second exposure. A few seconds is a bit much for holding the camera in hand. While this is a method I always use to take lightning photos, I couldn’t ignore the feeling it wasn’t really smart to continue holding on to an aluminium stick with a storm quite close.
That led me to another idea. Handheld. I should just make the shutter speed faster and set the shooting mode to the fastest my camera can do. And that is 11 frames per second. I stood a chance of taking one with lightning this way.
While the camera can take 11 photos each second, it can’t really save that many to an SD card in a short period of time. It can do it just over 20 seconds before the buffer fills up.
That was the reason I missed at least two good lightning strikes. I also needed to wipe the lens clean because it was raining a bit. Drops on the lens might be good in some cases, but that wasn’t one.
The storm was closing in slowly. The wind was picking up minute by minute. The rain was getting stronger and stronger. And I was standing there with camera in some slightly achy arms hoping not to get struck by lightning.
I was there for quite a while mostly taking hundreds and hundreds of photos and also enjoying the storm. I managed to take 3 photos with lightning. This was the most dramatic one.
It would be an understatement to write I’m happy with this image. It’s a handheld photo of awesome looking lightning, epic clouds and nice landscape. I couldn’t have hoped for a better result, especially given the whole struggle before I actually set off.
With that one in the bag, I waited for new storms patiently.
The next opportunity wasn’t really storm related. It was gravitating more towards a natural disaster. Slovenia was hit by a lot of rain on August 4th, 2023. A lot of rain fell in the NW, N and central Slovenia causing flash floods and rivers to rise dramatically.
Road were closed, motorways were closed, trains didn’t run everywhere and whole towns were inaccessible. Even the sirens were sounded.
As you can imagine I didn’t really want to get stranded somewhere, but I did go for a drive or two trying to experience what was happening.
I was standing on the road which was chiseled out of the hill on the right side of the river. The road was closed already and I had it for myself. The river was roaring making huge vortexes and carrying huge trees. I imagined it took them down somewhere up river.
It was very interesting to see water level this high. It is usually a good 10 or 15 meters below what the photos show.
It’s not like I wasn’t trying to reach other places or to even try to reach a good vantage point. But the main roads were mostly flooded with water level rising fast. I even managed to drive past the point on the last photo. It was hardly flooded. That was the sight after one hour. I couldn’t really pass it again in the oposite direction. It was a long drive over the hills back to starting point.
By the next morning I managed to find a different route. It took me to a vantage point among others. The water was receding already, but there was still a lot of it.
Traffic was starting to normalize in this area slowly which enabled me to drive into the valley to continue my exploration.
What I found was a lot of birds. Herons especially. They might have been driven out of their usual hunting ground and found new ones on the edge of the water. They didn’t seem to mind their changed habitat, though. They were searching for food as happily as any other time I saw them.
Some structures fared far better than others, of course. Not all are built on the river bed after all. However, some bridges succumbed to the immense power of the rushing water.
The fallen bridge was as far as I got that day.
This marked the end of storm related photography for 2023.
