Bag of Randomness for Wednesday, June 7, 2017

  • While driving home from the hospital yesterday after DaughterGeeding’s ER visit, BoyGeeding broke the silence with, “DaughterGeeding, you were very brave today in the hospital.”
  • WifeGeeding actually wanted BoyGeeding to stay at a friend’s house instead of going to the hospital, but I think it’s important not to shelter kids from reality and provide proper exposure as a learning experience. He may have been proud of his sister, but I was proud of him because his behavior was exceptional.
  • WifeGeeding had an odd Wal-Mart experience yesterday, but then again, aren’t all Wal-Mart experiences a bit odd? A woman, probably in her late twenties, was upset at the cashier for not loading the groceries bags into her cart. The cashier already bagged the groceries, three in total, but didn’t place them in the cart which upset the woman. I can’t recall a time any Wal-Mart cashier actually placed the bagged groceries in the cart. The women ranted on, asking the cashier if she would have placed the groceries in the cart if her arm was broken.
  • Georgia news – People rescued after apartment removes stairs
    • Firefighters rescued several people trapped on the second floor of an apartment building after the complex removed the stairs.
  • I have a friend named Scott who lives in Runaway Bay and can’t get a hold of him as I think he changed his phone number and email. If you are out there, drop me a line. If you entered the Witness Protection Program, disregard this message.
  • While chauffeuring the family around a song came on the radio which reminded me of a special moment WifeGeeding and I shared on my 40th birthday on the way to pick up our children after our hike up Guadalupe Peak, something totally out of the norm for me. The moment I shared with her was really special to me, something that made me think strengthened our bond and understanding of each other, and I remember her being real emotional about it and even brought to tears. As the song played I brought up the moment, but WifeGeeding had no memory of it whatsoever. I felt empty and just wanted to mosey away.
  • I prefer writing in blue ink.
  • A lengthy article about basketball nets of all things.
Posted in Personal | 7 Comments

A South Dakota Sunset

All spring I chase storms across the United States to collect footage of supercells, lightning, tornadoes and whatever I might find. Generally I don’t release any time-lapse clips from those chases until I put out my final end of season compilation film. But last night in North Dakota was too unreal to let sit on my hard drive for months.

We were chasing northeast of Bismarck, North Dakota and as storms were dying out, we decided to go for a lone cell on the backside of a line of storms. We knew it had a hail core on it and we were hoping that we might get some nice sunset color at least on the storm as it moved past us, and hopefully some lightning bolts. But we had no idea what we were about to encounter. The clouds were taking on a very different, curvy, wave-like appearance and suddenly we knew what we were seeing.

Undulatus asperatus clouds are a rare phenomenon and actually the newest named cloud type in over 60 years. I’ve seen tons of photos of them, but never anything like what we witnessed last night. We had a storm with hail in front of us and flashing lightning which was fantastic. But then we had this layer of undulatus clouds flowing across our view. Watching them was amazing already, but then the sun slowly appeared from behind some clouds to the west and lit up our storm like nothing we’ve ever seen before. We were like kids in a candy store. Running around, doing our best to capture it from every possible angle.

I did two time-lapses…one on the right side with a 50mm and then a wide angle with the 11mm. The colors here are real. I only increased the contrast. In fact, I was thinking of actually REDUCING the saturation because of how intense the colors looked with the contrast added. But that’s how it was and I left it that way. Six of us were there and all our photo and videos look the same.

This was undoubtedly one of the most incredible scenes I’ve witnessed chasing storms for the past 8 years.

Posted in Interesting | 2 Comments