It's around 3:30 a.m. during this shot. I'm just leaving my appartment to play around in the snow. This was supposed to be a strong snowstorm and it proved to be one. Why am I still awake at 3:30? I wanted to see thundersnow. I knew I had no ability to fall asleep before 1 a.m. so around then I said screw it, I'd just have to stay awake. You could see the radar returns getting more and more intense just ahead of the vortmax moving east from Colorado. I knew if I slept for a bit I'd sleep right on through and miss it all. I already screwed up once this day by not chasing eastern KS(they had a long-lived tornadic supercell I would have loved to have been on....sigh)....so I didn't wan't to miss out again.
So anyway, here I am leaving for the chase, albeit a bit sleepy. One has to love an F1.8 lens and 1600 ISO. It allows you to shoot handheld through the night. This was taken while crossing highway 75 in town. The snow was coming down hard enough now to stick to the roads.
My first stop was the bridge over the Missouri River. Snow at night can be very cool to shoot. The best way to shoot it is with some kind of lighting on it, obviously. It's best to keep the light source out of the shot, most of the time. You can end up with some cool shots if you have a subject in the dark past the lighting. If there wasn't a light off to my left I'm guessing you wouldn't be able to tell it is even snowing on the above shot.
After I swore someone behind me(in/near the river) says, "Mike",.... I decided to leave. It was some higher frequency noise that almost sounded like a person saying something. It may not have said my name, but it was certainly some noise I'd never heard there before. It just didn't take long for me to assume it was indeed, "Mike". Why then leave if someone were to say your name? Because it is 4 a.m. by a river and "they" shouldn't know my name. I didn't think of the water treatment thing that dumps into the river till after I was long gone. It is amazing how unbrave one can be alone. Had anyone else been with me I'd have wanted to go check it out.
So I leave, driving back down the road by the treatment plant, when what pulls out ahead of me at the stop sign? A cop. There's nothing to go to down there other than the plant, which is pretty small and with few workers. I was like, oh great, he's going to wonder what the hell I'm doing down there at 4 a.m. Instead of turning left, I go straight behind him. I knew if I went left then he'd just flip around and follow me forever. So, I followed him forever, till the next "normal"(main road) option. At that option he goes straight and I turn left. I think since I followed him from the start he didn't think much was up. I knew if I saw him many more times that would change. I've found it is rather easy to get pulled over in this town at night. So I take a bunch of side streets knowing I'll see him again. It was annoying because I wanted to look for things to shoot but I had to worry about him now. It's not like my excuse of "Oh officer, I was just out taking photos of the snow at 4 a.m." would work. Insane people would find doing that odd, I can only guess what most think. On rare occasions I can step back and look and it seems extremely stupid and like a waste of time, chasing storms, sometimes. I'll think for a bit....this is very stupid and ODD. Next storm though, it doesn't matter, I want to chase it and capture it.
After taking the "tour-de-Blair" on side streets, I make my way to the top of Colledge Drive...barely. This is the hill where the water tower(dome) sits. I still have my parent's van borrowed so that I can get out to their house and see the dogs. So, I'm taking a front wheel drive vehicle up this hill and not my Mustang. I lost speed the whole way to the top. I barely get over it as the front tires kept spinning. This wet stuff was sooooo slick. Once up there I was rather affraid of going back over that peak and down. I was like, I'm going to go into the scariest free slide for sure.
This is from that Neihardt Park at the end of Colledge Drive. I'm looking south towards the east side of Blair. I was surprised to see this turn out so red. The city lights are the cause. It did not seem nearly that red while taking the shot. I have some other chases up there like the July 31, 2006 lightning that show this effect...on a few.
Here is another example of shooting through illuminated snow at a darker object. I have some others from the December 30, 2006 snowstorm chase that show this kind of thing. After farting around up there for a bit I decided I needed to go somewhere else. I did not want to drive down that hill though. That free slide would not leave my head. I pulled out to the edge where it starts going down and then stopped. I sat there and just couldn't make myself go, lol. I was like, what am I going to use to slow down if I do start sliding. If you don't use breaks on this hill you'll be going about 60mph by the corner, where it starts to flatten out. I had wreck on my brain and decide to back up. I went another route in a residential area where the road twists going down, just as steep. This one though has a T and house at the end of it, which I didn't think about until I committed. I knew I had to go one way or the other and just went when I got to it. I kept the van creeping at under 10, right up next to the curb that had some snow piled up on it. I get back into town and who do I see at the intersection coming towards me? The cop. Not wanting to be stopped and questioned(it's happened before lol) I decide I need to either go home, or go to my parents and shoot stuff out there. It was still pretty early, but I thought if I waited much longer I'd never get the van out there, where I wanted to be to shoot the storm during the day anyway.
As I left town it began snowing extremely hard. I was glad they don't live far.
During the remaining dark hours I mostly shot video, trying to get the thundersnow that was now occuring. I was pretty good at walking back into the house during very close, bright flashes. I only managed a couple on video, as the majority of it seemed to be stuck around and south of Omaha. The above is the blizzard conditions kicking in. It was a fun little walk to the top of the hill to shoot.
A blizzard warning was issued for a county north and a county east of here the night before, February 28. Blair and Omaha would be added to it during the day, March 1st. It's now March 2nd as I type this and Blair is still in the blizzard warning through tomorrow morning, March 3rd. Wow. It had been since 1998 that Omaha was in a blizzard warning. This 2-3 day stuff is kind of nuts.
After getting the camera a bit wet I head back down to the house. Right before getting there, a huge gust of wind removes a lot of the stuck snow from the tops of some taller trees...bam, a massive, very tall circulation of snow comes flying at me. The above was taken from within the vortex!..., lol.
Conditions outside the "snow vortex from hell". There is a small plow attached to the back of the tractor.
You can see how steep their driveway is. I'm in the corner half way up it. It goes left off the shot, down to the road. If the road leading to it is ok I can sometimes get my Mustang up it, if I get a good run at it. One of the last times I did I wound up sliding down most of the driveway as I went to leave. When backing out of the driveway the trick is to go fast and get the back end to go right and up the portion that goes to deck in back. You only have to go far enough so that you can point the front end down hill. Well sometimes before the front comes around to point down, the back lets loose and slides sideways. That last time the back slid, then the front started to come around again, so I cranked it, thinking it'd spin clear around this time, but then the back slid again. I wound up sliding all the way past where I'm standing. I thought for sure I was going to wind up in the trees behind me. I take the 4x4 blazer out later this day and the same thing happens in it! Well I didn't get as far. The back end slid though, instead of going up the incline. The snow was too deep I guess. Next thing you know you are facing those trees on the left without being able to do much to get it out of there.
There is the rest of the way to the road. My mom actually drove to her job in Omaha this morning, only to come back early(30 minute trip took her 2 hours in the morning). So, we(mostly my dad since the snow blower was clogging up with wet snow) had to get the driveway clear or there is no way the Blazer would get up it.
I make trip number 2 to the top of the hill. Right at the top where it drifts is butt deep.
There was a big difference in the wind this time. It was rather whicked now.
It certainly wasn't the greatest of shooting conditions.
This was a rare shot I took to the north. I could hear something big coming. This one was pretty sweet. I turned around as it hit and faced south. It had to be sustaining above 50mph for that short period. It was cool to lean into it as it kept roaring.
This was looking back to the south during it.
I drove into town for the first time after 2 p.m. or so. I've never seen it so bad in and around town. You'd get to areas you just couldn't see what the hell you were driving on. Most anything other than a main road looked like you just didn't want to drive onto it. I was surprised at just how hard it was to find a spot to stop and shoot. This is the road that leads down to the Blair Bridge. I wanted to go down there, but I decided against it. It's open to the north, but there is a hill just right of the road. You'd think with the hill there it'd sort of help the blowing just north of it. I figured if anywhere probably had some bad drifting it was down that road. Then again, usually it's the worst on the downwind side...though I'm sure it's far from great down there.
This gives a good idea of the strength of the winds. I'm now in my appartment looking west at the other ones. The first snow was very wet. The wind removed the strip on the west side of the east appartments...down to the grass...even though it was quite wet. Meanwhile it is drifted to the door handles on west ones.
I was very happy to finally be home and done chasing as I'd not slept in 32 hours. I can probably count on one hand the times I've made it 24 hours without sleep. I'm not sure I've ever gone 32. I go to sleep at 5 and wake up at 8 and feel refreshed. I didn't quite understand how that worked. Then I go back to sleep about 11 and sleep till 9 and all day have felt SHOT.
Ok, it's now March 2nd...still in the blizzard warning. My dad gave me a ride out to their house so I could see the dogs and get some stills off their computer. I ran out of card space yesterday so I dumped them onto their pc and needed to put them back on the card today so I could dump those onto my computer at home(and somehow during this it screwed up the numbering of the images as these later images have numbers that were already taken the day before....something screwed/killed the one flash card enough that it won't work now, so I took these shots on the other...so maybe it has something to do with that....thought I'd mention it incase anyone looks at the numbers and wonders....rest assured these last three are from the 2nd....if you look you can see this above one is 0449.....while the appartment shot above it is 0518....I don't get exactly how that happened!.....maybe when I put the broke flashcard in the camera after it froze the computer, it reset something in the cam as it froze the camera as well). While getting a ride back I went to the store to get some pop. While I waited for my dad to get the things he needed, I saw this interesting wall of snow moving in. On the way there you could see the sun shining through and the visibility in town was far from bad. We noticed a very dark area to the ne, so dark that I wasn't even sure it could be a snow squall. I was wondering if there was somehow some massive fire across the river, but figured it must be one intense snow "shower". So I'm sitting here waiting and find out exactly what that was lol. Glad I had my camera with me to get those files or I'd have been empty handed here at the store. This above is the snow squall just hitting.
That great visibility has now taken a tremendous dump. Visibility was now half a block, at best. I can only imagine what people out on the highways thought when this happened. You'd pretty much just have to stop and wait. It was bad.
This is in town and that front end loader is less than half a block from us. Just 5 minutes ago there was no snow and a person could see for several miles.
This storm is one to remember. The majority of the interstates under the wintery side of it were closed and closed for a long time. Hell I think I-80 from Omaha to Des Moines is still closed as of this writing. I guess the national guard is still doing search and rescue on roads in western Iowa. I'll try and get out to shoot any cool drift shots once I feel it is wise to do so.