View allAll Photos Tagged storms
27/1
Some ominous clouds before some heavy rain
I was hoping for more dark clouds but these did the trick. I wanted the dark silhouette of the electricity pole but looking at it now I wish there was something extra in the frame. Maybe an ominous looking crow perched on one of the wires :P.
Plus side: It is Friday.
Downside: It is supposed to storm today.
Headband, bag: Charlotte Russe (I never thought anything of this store until I decided to do an intensive Russian program in Bloomington, IN for the summer. One of the only things to do is go to the mall.)
Necklaces: Thrifted
Top: Thrifted
Belt: Thrifted
Skirt: Thrifted
Skimmer flats: Target
Inspiration: I have been living out of two suitcases for nearly two months. What haven't I worn?
The last of the overnight storms are heading eastward and out of the area. Three exposure HDR processed with Photomatix
I was on the coast in Rockport, Maine when a few storm cells passed by. Luckily, none came directly on us when we were out in the harbor.
This is a two shot stitched panorama from the archives that I did a little post processing to. I hope you like it!
Best viewed by pressing "L".
During my recent visit to Roanoke VA an ice storm blew through the area. This shot was taken through the windshield as Saintbridge and I drove through the country north of Roanoke. Everything static was covered in ice and while the ice that formed did do some damage to power lines and trees, its view was spectacular and that in some small way lessened the effects of damage.
Whilst waiting for the train in severe cold at Stiege on the Harz system a storm was developing behind us. It was very cold
Taken 6/27/2009 in central Illinois. This was my first session attempting lightning photography. It was the ideal night for photographing lighting, because it was off in the distance and it hadn't started raining yet.
This image was drastically over-exposed, and I nearly deleted it from the camera. I used Lightroom to recover the highlights, drop the exposure by two full stops, bump the contrast, increase the black clipping, and darken the dark tones.
Camera: Canon 350D
Lens: 24-104 @ 28mm
Exposure: 10 seconds at ISO400 and f/4.
//What a disaster
William Saunderson-Meyer says the floods just another blow to a province that was already on its knees
KwaZulu-Natal has declared a provincial state of disaster to try to cope with the devastating floods of the past week.
This is normally a temporary mechanism of which the primary purpose is to facilitate speedy national government assistance to hard-pressed provincial and local authorities. It also triggers the release of emergency funds from the National Treasury.
But in KZN’s case, they might as well make it permanent. This is a province that has been on its knees for some time and it ain’t getting up any time soon.
After all, KZN hasn’t even staunched the bloodied nose it suffered nine months ago. That’s when one wing of the African National Congress government — the Radical Economic Transformation followers of former president Jacob Zuma — tried to bury the other — the so-called reformists led by President Cyril Ramaphosa.
KZN hasn’t even properly tallied the body blows it suffered then. The official estimates for the insurrection were 45,000 businesses affected, R50bn in economic damage, 129,000 jobs lost, and 354 killed.
These estimates are probably on the low side. For example, the number of people who were killed in the mayhem doesn’t include the many whose bodies were simply never found and counted.
And the true economic cost is incalculable. There’s been substantially increased emigration of minorities, cancelled investment, and the loss of international confidence in KZN as a safe tourist destination. In at least a dozen small, country towns, all the business infrastructure was destroyed, paradoxically by the very people who worked and shopped in those buildings.
Now the floods. The death toll is over 300 and still rising. Some 6,000 homes have been destroyed and road, water sewage and electrical infrastructure uprooted. As I write this, roaming mobs are opportunistically plundering container depots, stranded trucks, abandoned homes and vulnerable businesses, reportedly unhindered — as was the case during last year’s riots — by the police and army.
Naturally, no disaster is complete without a scapegoat. Ramaphosa, as is his style, was quick off the mark to finger the culprit — climate change.
“This disaster is part of climate change. It is telling us that climate change is serious, it is here,” Ramaphosa told reporters while inspecting a devastated Durban. “We no longer can postpone what we need to do, and the measures we need to take to deal with climate change.”
What balderdash. Whatever role climate change may or may not have played in the larger scheme of things, it’s nonsense to pin on it responsibility for the plight of KZN. That lies with the ANC government.
First, this was not an unforeseeable bolt from the heavens. The forecasters warned months back that this was likely to be an exceptionally wet summer because of the La Niña weather pattern that occurs every few years.
There are also historical precedents for extreme weather in KZN, which a prudent administration would have taken note of.
In 1984, Tropical Storm Domoina wreaked havoc in a swathe from Mozambique, through Swaziland to KZN. Although the current downpour is worse, the scale is nevertheless in the same ballpark.
This latest storm — as yet unnamed — dumped 450mm of rain on Durban in 48 hours. Domoina let loose 615mm in 24 hours on Swaziland and northern KZN.
But the true difference between those events, 38 years apart, lies in the lack of preparedness on the part of today’s authorities. In 1984 the SA Air Force deployed 25 helicopters to airlift people to safety. In the 2000 Mozambique floods, 17 SAAF helicopters rescued more than 14,000 people.
This time, according to a News24 report, the SA Police Service and the SAAF, combined, have been unable to put a single chopper in the air. The erosion of South Africa’s military means that of the SAAF’s 39 Oryx helicopters, only 17 are serviceable.
Durban-based 15 Squadron has not a single helicopter available for search and rescue — they are reportedly primarily used as VIP transport — but two SAAF choppers supposedly have been despatched from Gqeberha to help. The SAPS airwing has only one serviceable helicopter but “the pilot on duty has been booked off sick”.
Second, throughout the province, local government is also in a state of disaster and unable to do its job. The scale of the KZN impairment can be measured in the flood destruction of homes.
Some 4,000 shanties have been destroyed, many because officialdom was too lax to forbid building on the floodplain and against precariously unstable hillsides. Another 2,000 of the homes swept away were so-called RDP houses, shoddily built during the kickback-and-steal bonanza of the government’s Reconstruction and Development Programme of the late 1990s.
In Durban, the eThekwini metro is bloated and inert. It carries a rates and services debt of R17bn, of which R1bn is owed by the national government.
Durban is also infamously corrupt. Former mayor Zandile Gumede — along with 21 co-accused — is facing fraud, corruption and money-laundering charges in connection with a R320m municipal tender.
Yet at the weekend, even as the rain was bucketing down, she won the ANC’s regional leadership contest hands-down, despite the party’s supposed “step-aside when accused” rule.
The ANC-aligned Ahmed Kathrada Foundation has no illusions about the party it supports. It issued a statement calling on the government to ensure that unlike the plundering of Covid-19 emergency relief funds, the KZN disaster funds were not stolen or misused.
Fat chance. The ANC has already announced that its parliamentary constituency offices in KZN would become “hubs for humanitarian support” and appealed for the donation of relief supplies. Watch the trousering by the ANC’s public representatives of anything that the public is dumb enough to leave with them.
It’s in KZN where the ANC’s brazen indifference to the law and antipathy towards the Constitution is at its most obvious and most destructive.
On Monday, Zuma's corruption trial once again failed to take off in the Pietermaritzburg High Court when he successfully blocked the process with another round of delaying legal actions. His lawyers also had some carefully threatening words for the judiciary in a separate Supreme Court of Appeal action.
They urged SCA President Mandisa Maya to reconsider the dismissal of his latest corruption prosecution challenges. They warned that last year’s deadly July unrest was “in part, traceable to a perceived erroneous and unjust judicial outcome” that put Zuma briefly in prison for contempt of court.
“When such conceived mistakes are committed, the citizens (wrongly) feel entitled to resort to self-help…”
Floods, fires and locusts are devastating but at least happen relatively rarely. The ANC, alas, is a seemingly unending plague.
HDR, or "High Dynamic Range" is a type of photography that utilizes several images in order to create one image that captures as much lighting detail as possible. I have a tutorial up here that explains how to do this in Photoshop CS4. There are more popular programs out there, such as Photomatix, though I tend to not be fond of the output of such programs, as they often come off as being extremely unrealistic.
I'm testing out a new HDR algorithm; in the past, I'd never really found an HDR program that could render realistic output in storm situation or handle the fact that clouds tended to move between shots. I think this one is zeroing in.
This photo was taken on April 23, 2006, in central Kansas. In the foreground are storm chasers Amos Magliocco and Robert Hall.
A late summer storm graces my lens at Sparks lake, Oregon.
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Not the first of the day, nor the last. From my office window.
Let me also refer you to my kid's photo of the same storm, taken from his workplace. www.flickr.com/photos/ehfisher/3642946814/ Interesting that as the storm blew in we both had the same idea for photos, though, with his younger brain cells, he also had the idea of a panorama and a video.
Both featured on Chicagoist chicagoist.com/2009/06/20/city_walloped_by_woolly_weather...
It's storm season again and Solaris is bursting with energy. She adores a good storm and I'm guessing we will be having a lot now that she's learning to master her gifts.
The weather in Calgary, Alberta changes so rapidly no matter what the calendar is. I'm off a third level deck on a roof line in red latex and red stilettos within the eye of a circling storm. Certainly, it has my attention.
Production by Allen Pierson