Wild-Weather.com

Landed in Tucson last night with lightning striking the ground to the south. The forecast for the next few days is pretty wild. There should be lots of opportunities for some great lightning shots. When I got to my hotel my Convergent Design NanoFlash was waiting for me. This little box will be great for this shoot as it has a pre record function that records the 4 seconds or so prior to pressing the record button. By using that I will be able to set the camera up facing the storm and as soon as I see a lightning bolt I can press record and instead of filling up the cards with hours of junk all I’ll have is short clips each containing a lightning bolt! I have a PDW-700 and an EX1 with me and I’ll be using the NanoFlash with both. I’m looking forward to seeing lightning at 100Mb/s. Lightning is quite challenging for any codec due to it’s very short transient nature. The XDCAM codecs have always done a good job, but Im expecting something special from the NanoFlash.

The plan for today is to head out to the west of Tucson this afternoon, maybe to Kitt Peak to catch the storms as soon as they get going. I’ll post later and get some frame grabs or clips online as soon as I can.

With just a little less than 10 days before I depart for tornado alley I thought I would look at the forecast models. Certainly the next few days are going to be very active with several days of severe weather across the plains. Today and tomorrow look like big tornado outbreak days. Looking further ahead I think we will see 5 days of pretty active weather before things quieten down for a few days. Then a further round of severe weather looks likely to start some time around may 6th. Of course looking this far ahead with computer models is never accurate but I had to look anyway. can’t bear sitting here seeing a major outbreak on-going and not being able to go due to existing work commitments.

Want to join me on my adventures. Watch this blog for further details of expeditions with spare seats.