Just point your cameras to the skies and shoot: Lubbock on August 14

August 14, 2013

With all the cameras around, if everybody just points their own camera to the skies and starts shooting, we’ll get some good shots.

Tonight the Texas Storm Chasers sent this one out:

Storm over Lubbock, Texas, August 14, 2013 - photo by Texas Storm Chasers

Texas Storm Chasers ‏@TxStormChasers 27m RT @TaylorKLynn: @TxStormChasers Took these from my phone of the storm heading into northern Lubbock! pic.twitter.com/5LQX1qBWsN #txwx

Looks like “Night on Storm Prairie” to me. (Where’s Disney when you need em?)

Shot with a camera phone, I’m guessing from inside a hotel (are those reflections in the window?).  Not sure who shot it, so I’ve just credited “Texas Storm Chasers.”

Weather is cool.  Photos of weather are cool, too.

More:

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Posted by Ed Darrell

Thunder is impressive, but it’s lightning that does the work

July 11, 2013

Nice photo from Texas Storm Chasers:

David Reimer's great shot of lightning, about 10:00 p.m. in Norman, Oklahoma, July 11, 2013

David Reimer’s great shot of lightning, about 10:00 p.m. in Norman, Oklahoma, July 11, 2013

Good luck, and keep ’em coming, David!

(Mark Twain observed:  “Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.” (Letter, August 28, 1908))

3 Comments | Art, Nature, photography, Science | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Lightning? Don’t stand under a tree . . .

October 2, 2011

Talk in class turned to Ben Franklin’s kite experiment.  “Don’t try this at home,” I said.

Do students ever listen?

Here’s an amateur video showing why standing under a tree in a lightning storm could be a bad idea.  Can students extrapolate this to flying a kite in a storm?

Surely there is better video of such events somewhere . . . can you tell us where?

Found it at Wimp.com, with a tip of the old scrub brush to Thom Holland, Scouter with the 626 units at Penasquitos Lutheran Church, San Diego, California.

1 Comment | Boy Scouts of America, Nature, Science | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Astounding lightning strike photo — Chicago Tribune readers show proper skepticism

June 27, 2010

Amazing photo of two Chicago buildings struck by lightning simultaneously, by Chicago Tribune photog  Chris Sweda:

Dual lightning strike in Chicago, June 2010 - photo by Chris Sweda, Chicago Tribune

Dual lightning strike in Chicago, June 2010 - photo by Chris Sweda, Chicago Tribune

Among other things, the photo isn’t perfect enough to suggest post-shutter-snap manipulation — you can see from other photos that the rain drops on the window disappear with a focus farther away.

Blair Kamin writing at Cityscapes discussed skepticism from readers of the Chicago Tribune about whether the strikes were really simultaneous, or instead the result of a very long exposure.

Exactly the sort of skepticism anti-warmists should have exhibited when confronted with the story of a fourth-grade student in Beeville, Texas, disproving global warming, or the story of a Spanish solar energy company sending a bomb by courier to an anti-warmist, and then bragging about it.

Kamin offers a couple of paths by which a reasonable person can determine it was a chance photo, the photographer pushing the shutter release coincidentally with a double lightning strike (see the “postscripts” section of Kamin’s post).

Were they true to their warming science, in the anti-warmist world two camps would be forming.  One camp would argue the photograph was manipulated, a clever collage of two different photos, or maybe a clever use of miniatures; the other camp would argue that lightning doesn’t strike man-made objects.

1 Comment | Climate change, climate_change, denialism, Global warming, History, How do we know what we know, photography, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell