#sunset storms

it was a really short lived sunset, a wall of cloud ate the sun, but man was it dynamic and amazing. 

we’re finally getting closer to the time of year I live for. the summer storms and all the magic in the big alberta skies. This year feels a bit heavier than most. I’ve been doing this now over 5 years and you’d think I’d run out of love for it but in fact the recent issues with my back and health have just concentrated my focus and made me deeply deeply fucking grateful for every day I get where I can get out and make pictures. I love the dark clouds but I'm kinda over living under one health wise the last 6 months--that said nothing focuses your attention like feeling you may lose something you really care about. storm season #1 with the super expensive medium format camera which just gobbles up the complex light of sunset storms... how many years have I dreamt of this? 

for those of you who personally give two craps, health wise we’re in the weeding out the serious stuff phase one issue at a time and trying to work out what is my broken down back and what isn’t. I had a rib dislocated for 5 months and that’s hopefully going to be the cause of most of the things going on but health stuff moves way too slowly. In the interim I’m picking my fights and trying to make the best use of the days I'm feeling half human to make as many pictures as I can. 

took the day off work to head up to what could have been a tornadic storm up north and the storm didn’t pan out on so many levels. it was a hail infested monster that beat the hell out of a lot of chasers (I avoided the hail, thankfully) and had incredible straight-line winds that made visibility pretty scary at times, and it was FAST. too fast to really get good photos, or at all enjoy the experience. I should have took my escape route quicker and let it pass because it was literally tearing the environment apart and there was such complex light. I raced past all the best pictures. 

I’ll never learn I guess, that I'm not really a storm chaser so much as someone interested in the weird light and beautiful oddities that happen around storms as they pull and shape the environment. a sort of environmental portraitist. 

Turned out, I got all these just 20 minutes from home, after chasing a much smaller storm for a bit and landing in my sweet spot, sunset. 

I also killed a beautiful bird. I tried to swerve away but he went the wrong way and that was that. magic. destroyed. his unimaginably light bones a pile of mess on the gravel. I went back to make sure he died (not laying there suffering) and also to just let him know I was sorry. That’s stupid. he’s dead, but stuff like that frustrates me. 

so, the moral is remember what matters. focus yourself on the things you care about not the hullabaloo. the spectacle is always distracting you from something just a little deeper, and if the costs of business are the needless deaths of amazing flying machines you best be coming back with something precious.