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© Ray Skwire
As the city began to disappear into the rain, I felt my chances of a strike on the city fading as the rain was moving in fast. Only a few clicks away from packing up, this banger of a bolt suddenly sprang down out of the clouds into the Delaware River, thunder echoing almost immediately across the water.
© Ray Skwire
As I have the last several days, I've been heading to Camden each night for sunset to redo a particular shot that I got about a year ago. After yesterday's rain, it was kind of a priority to get out today because the window for this shot is almost closed. However, if you hadn't noticed today, there were really interesting clouds and rain shafts all over the place today with lots of structure and precipitation. So when I was pulling up at the waterfront and saw an incredible rain shaft just north of the Ben Franklin Bridge, I thought about chasing it, then decided against it, and then quickly changed my mind once more. Now, I've already posted a shot of this from later on in this chase and I will likely post some more of it finally moving away from me, but I actually fired off a bunch of shots of this while cruising because I knew there was a good chance that I simply would not be able to catch up with this and that with the sun starting to wind down, this was going to start falling apart. So, I'm glad that I did shoot out the window because this actually turned out well. I had to adjust the level and crop in because it was pretty cockeyed, and I did enhance the structure some because it was soft (shooting it at 20mm from farther away than it appears), but I can guarantee that's actually exactly how it looked - large swirling wisps of rain, mammatus, significant turbulence, and amazing structure. What a thing of beauty!
© Ray Skwire
South Jersey Sunset
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As I was making my way towards the Wharton State forest fire on my way home last night, I got lucky enough to catch the sun sinking down over the smoke filled pinelands, which was both a beautiful and eerie site.
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© Ray Skwire
Small LP Supercell over Southern New Jersey this weekend during a severe weather outbreak that brought tornados, high wind wind, heavy rain, hail, and lightning to the MD/DE/PA/NJ region.
The first two images are the supercell and the third is just a screengrab that also shows the tornadic cell that came from DE, across the Delaware Bay, and into Cape May before the main line of thunderstorm eventually moved in.
We were situated outside Elmer, NJ after having move inland from closer to the Delaware River in order to better position ourselves for intercept of several cells forecast for the area.
While photographing these cells and other interesting clouds here, we saw the tornadic cell that we were banking on all day taking shape in DE but tracking North of us, so back in the car we went, dodging other areas of rain and storms moving in to try and get lined up with it until we just where we couldn't go any further and it was there that we stopped and shot the shelf cloud in the previous posts.
What a chase!
© Ray Skwire
It's been a bit since I've made it down to the John Heinz Wildlife Refuge and it has changed some. Perhaps I've just been coming around dead low tide during a relatively full moon, but the front of the refuge north of the boardwalk has been so incredibly low that it is full of lush vegetation and on today's trips, as well as a recent trip last week, there was a family of deer well into where there is usually water. Today was relatively quiet for shooting - the ospreys weren't hunting much, there were tons of herons and egrets far out, and there were carp, enormous turtles, and some frogs out, like this guy. As it always is, it's an enjoyable trip within (yet away from) the city.