Chasing Twisters - The Dark Side of Mother Nature  by Tim Green

After an initial introduction to Tim’s journey in photography, encompassing urban and traditional landscapes, and people/travel imagery, the talk moved on to focus on his recent passion for learning about, experiencing and photographing extreme weather events.

The first half of the talk looked at the underlying physical principles of extreme weather events, focusing on ‘Tornado Alley’ - the belt of land in central United States which has the Rockies to its west and the Great Plains to the east, encompassing states such as Texas, Kansas and Nebraska.

To whet our appetite for what was to come, Tim shared videos from some of his recent trips with ‘Tornadic Expeditions’, the US company that he uses to explore this fascinating landscape and weather phenomenon. The company runs three types of trips: an ‘Experience Tour', a 'Photography Tour’ and the ‘Finger of God’ tour, with the latter being a more extreme venture into the heart of ‘EF5’ storms; the highest rating on the Fujita Scale which is used to categorise tornados based on the damage they cause.

Some of the video footage portrayed the slightly wild west nature of these trips, with convoys of cars excitedly following storms. One got a sense of the camaraderie and community that tracking storms engenders and the thrill of the chase as we were introduced to the vehicles used for these tours including 'Dominator 3' - a specialist tornado inceptor vehicle with iron plating to protect passengers from falling debris and hailstones and with spikes to fix the vehicle to the ground to prevent it being overturned.

Tim has joined all three tour types, as he wanted to both experience the essence of the storm up close, as well as keeping a slight distance from it, which is more conducive to photographically documenting the storms where some clouds can reach 50,000 feet in height and spread an equal distance horizontally. We learned about the anatomy of such clouds and how they formed and matured with the top ‘cap' being breached as moisture travels upwards, culminating in a Stage 6 ‘super supercell’ cloud and associated wind, rain, hail and other weather phenomenon. A tornado is only recognised as such if the rotating cloud hits the ground.

In the second half, Tim talked through the practicalities of completing a storm-watching tour and shared the reality that much of the time is spent sitting in vehicles and waiting for a weather event to evolve. His last trip covered 6900 miles in ten days, with three or four visits to gas stations daily. What all of his travel allowed was the chance to see much of mid-western US countryside and associated buildings and culture. This often provided excellent photographic opportunities, with structures such as grain silos, wooden churches, and telegraph poles providing added interest and compositional focus to supplement the incredible stormy skies, with their dramatic high contrast light and array of colours. A personal favourite was the gorgeous mammatus clouds, worth a trip to see in itself.

Taken on his medium format Hasselblad X2D2 camera and 20-35 and 35-100 lenses, Tim’s images did justice to both the American landscape and the amazing weather events he has seen and experienced. Having presented us with the sound and images of hand-sized hailstones it clearly is quite an experience. Tim talked through some of the challenges of photography in this environment, notably the high dynamic range and the need to handhold and respond quickly to changing conditions. He also stressed the need to pack light - room in the six-person vehicles was at a premium - and the need for a specialist insurer such as Dogtag - although the number of waivers included did lead one to question whether this was particularly worthwhile.

Overall, the club was treated to an informative and entertaining evening. For those interested in following up on Tim’s talk, some  relevant links are:-

https://www.timgreenphotography.com

https://www.tornadicexpeditions.com

Peter Yendall