In Pictures: Photos from a US storm chaser

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(Image credit: Camille Seaman)

Supercell storm above Browerville, Minnesota

American photographer Camille Seaman spent eight years chasing supercell storms around the US, capturing their sublime and terrifying splendour in captivating images.

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I travel the world capturing fleeting moments of power in diverse landscapes. From melting icebergs at both poles to stormy states across the US, my images showcase the beauty and fragility of nature. I began storm chasing after my daughter, eight years old at the time, suggested it might be of interest while we were watching the Storm Chasers TV show.

It was the light, the colour and the strange nature of the clouds themselves that drew me to actually do a web search, contact a chaser and then just three days later, find myself in a vehicle driving fast through bad weather. After that first chase week, I asked the trip leader if he had any other spaces available and he asked me if I could drive. Then he hired me on the spot, and I officially became a professional chaser.

We would chase as far south as Texas and as far north as the Dakotas. We stayed mostly in the Great Plains but sometimes found ourselves as far west New Mexico. It was for a long time something I enjoyed doing. But after eight years I had had my fill. My book The Big Cloud is an opus to that time.

(Credit: Camille Seaman)

I wasn’t prepared for just how overwhelming an experience chasing can be. This storm in Kansas was visceral and multisensory: the smell of the charged particles, the sweetness of the grass, the scent of the pavement just before it rains, the sight of the wind blowing through cornfields. Not to mention the colours of the clouds and the light of the sky and the lightning. It was all so beautiful, so awesome and so humbling at the same time.

(Credit: Camille Seaman)

When I’m storm chasing, I feel a sense of belonging. Not because I’m photographing, but because I am present and realise that our experience as humans on this planet is limitless. Everything is interrelated. The storms provide vital water and nutrients to the very fertile plains. Something about being there as a witness to this incredible force, this elemental force of vortex energy, reminds me that I am part of this great interconnection.

(Credit: Camille Seaman)

I like images that don’t look overworked or manipulated, such as this one I took in Bartlett, Nebraska. The storm is already so amazing, there’s no need to accentuate it. I look for images that capture the structure and compositional balance and have a sensitivity to colour and light. When you get the image, you feel it.

(Credit: Camille Seaman)

Supercell storms, like this one near Browerville, Minnesota, can be 50 miles wide, so it’s almost impossible to fit that into a 24mm lens on a full-frame camera, and there’s no time to set up a tripod. Clouds are a little forgiving to photograph because they are soft shapes with no hard edges, but it’s very dark. A lot of my images are taken with a wide aperture to let the most available light in. When photographing storms, my advice would be to have both a long lens (telephoto) as well as a wide-angle lens.

(Credit: Camille Seaman)

Whenever we pulled into a town, inevitably we’d stand out as we’d have storm chasing equipment on our car. People either saw us as a bad omen or they’d say, “Is it coming our way?”. There is nothing more frightening than hearing those storm sirens go off. You have all this warm, moist air being sucked into the plains, you have rotating clouds. You can feel the warm air against your back, being pulled into the storm.

(Credit: Camille Seaman)

I grew up always knowing to respect nature and its power. At no point during this storm in Presho, South Dakota, did I feel brazen, like I’m invincible. At the same time, in storm chasing, you want to stay on the chasing side. You don’t want to become chased. That can pivot very quickly. As careful as you want to be, sometimes that’s irrelevant.

(Credit: Camille Seaman)

Once, after determining we weren’t in danger, we decided to stay put while a massive rotating cloud known as a low precipitation mesocyclone passed overhead of Lodgepole, Nebraska. It looked like a spaceship. It was one of the few times where I didn’t know what to do. Anywhere you looked, it was unreal. The cloud was so large it occupied the entire visual space. I needed a bigger lens. You couldn’t make one wide enough.

(Credit: Camille Seaman)

Storm chasing isn’t for everyone. When Tim Samaras (one of the US’ most respected and safety-conscious chasers) died in the 2013 El Reno tornado (pictured above), that storm felt like a wake-up call. I tried to chase the following year, but when we were out there, it was like I had lost my nerve. I missed a lot of great opportunities because I wouldn’t get close enough. I could feel that I was done.

But what I learned was that storm chasing offers an insight into some of the most powerful and beautiful forces on our planet. However, you must have immense respect and common sense. Don’t chase on your own. Find responsible, vetted tour leaders. Most of all, be safe out there.

Camille Seaman is an American photographer who applies portraiture strategies to capture the changing natural environment.Many of her photographs focus on the natural world, including icebergs and clouds.

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Ansel Adams: Eight of the most iconic photos of the American West

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(Image credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust)

The Tetons and Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, 1942

Ansel Adams’ images of national parks and oil derricks from the 30s and 40s are a powerful reminder of the beauty and fragility of the US’s natural landscapes, writes Cath Pound.

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Ansel Adams is one of the giants of 20th Century photography, esteemed for his lush gelatine silver photographs of the national parks that have become icons of the US wilderness. A passionate champion of photography as a legitimate form of fine art, he referred to his most stunning images as his “Mona Lisas”. But Adams was also a tireless conservationist and wilderness preservationist who understood the power of a strong image to sway public and political opinion.

His stirring images of US national parks have no doubt always inspired a desire to protect the natural world. But his lesser-known images of oil derricks and the decimated landscapes in California’s Owens Valley have also taken on a renewed relevance in today’s era of climate change.

Ansel Adams in Our Times at the de Young Museum, San Francisco showcases some of his most celebrated works, as well as those that are less familiar, revealing the ways in which his powerful imagery continues to advocate for the protection of the environment. 

(Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

(Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

1. The Golden Gate Before the Bridge, 1932

San Francisco, the city of Adams’ birth, is where he first took up the large-format camera. “With images like this, one can sense his excitement with this new tool,” the exhibition’s curator, Karen Haas, tells BBC Culture.

“This is the strait that lies between San Francisco and the Marin headlands, a view that had been visible from his childhood home. The beach below is one that he regularly combed as a somewhat lonely and awkward only child, reinforcing his connection with nature even while living in the city and not in Yosemite,” says Haas.

(Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

(Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

2. Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, c 1937

When Adams was invited by US President Gerald Ford to visit the White House in 1975, he took with him a copy of Clearing Winter Storm, one of his most celebrated images. At the time Adams was frustrated with the commercial exploitation and poor management of the country’s parks, and as he presented the print he said “Now, Mr President every time you look at this picture I want you to remember your obligation to the national parks.”

“It really speaks to the impact of the image. For Adams it was so much about showing the beauty, and through the beauty advocating for, and bringing concern for, the preservation of that beauty,” assistant curator Sarah Mackay tells BBC Culture.

(Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

(Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

3. Rain, Yosemite Valley, California, c 1940

Yosemite was key to Adams’ development as a photographer and a place for which he felt a great affinity. “It’s where he first took up the camera in 1916. He had been given a Brownie [camera] for a vacation trip when he was just a teenager. He’s one of those young people who really found himself through photography,” says Haas.

The valley was a place he photographed many times and although this particular image may not be as famous as Clearing Winter Storm, it actually takes in the same view, only with the magnificent mountains obscured by mist, revealing Adams’ appreciation of the natural world in all its infinite varieties.

(Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

(Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

4. The Tetons and Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, 1942

“This is one of his most critically acclaimed works, exemplifying Adams’ ability to capture the rich nuance of the environment around him,” Mackay says.

The photo was taken as part of the national parks project, instigated by the Department of the Interior. The department was forced to withdraw funding when the US entered World War Two, but Adams, inspired both by the beauty of the parks and a desire to spread awareness of the need to protect them, successfully applied for two Guggenheim Foundation grants in 1946 and 1948, which enabled him to continue photographing the national parks across the country.

(Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

(Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

5. Denali and Wonder Lake, Denali National Park and Preserve, 1948

Thanks to one of the Guggenheim grants Adams was able to spend a week in Alaska in July 1948. However, the conditions were challenging to say the least. There were only two days without rain and his camera was constantly filled with mosquitos.

He managed to capture the one, truly striking image of that trip at around 1.30am when the Sun, which had only set two hours earlier, was already starting to rise. “Nothing comes above the mountain because it’s the highest peak in the US,” explains Haas. The snowy expanse of the mountain is lit while everything else remains in shadow. “This is one of his Mona Lisas for certain,” she says.

(Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

(Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

6. Burned Trees, Owens Valley, California, c 1936

“The national parks are the pictures that everyone wants to see, but I actually think the most compelling environmental messaging can be found in the images around places like Owens Valley,” says Haas.

While the parks were, and are, protected spaces, Owens Valley had been stripped of much of its natural resources. It had been a centre for silver, lead and zinc mining and the water had been sucked away to serve urban spaces.

“It’s a devastated landscape but he’s finding the beauty in it. He’s very much wanting to call attention to this space,” says Haas.

(Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

(Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

7. Grass and Burned Stump, Sierra Nevada, California, 1935

Grass and Burned Stump is an image that has taken on a meaning that Adams, who would have been used to controlled burns, probably didn’t have in mind at the time. “Today when we look at that picture it has an environmentalist bent, but I think when Adams took that picture what he was compelled by was the aesthetic and physical qualities of the tree trump itself,” says Mackay.

(Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

(Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

8. Cemetery Statue and Oil Derricks, Long Beach, California, 1939

Twenty-first Century viewers looking at Adams’ striking photograph of a cemetery figure in a mourning pose in front of a sea of oil derricks are undoubtedly going to view it as a comment on the negative impact of oil drilling. Again that may not have been Adams’ original intention, but that certainly does not diminish the contemporary power of the image.

“What I love about that photo is the way that images are reborn or reinterpreted over time and I think that’s a really important element of Ansel Adams’ photographs when we look at them today,” says Mackay.

Ansel Adams in Our Times is at the de Young Museum, San Francisco until 23 July.

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The photo that made the plastics crisis personal

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When photographer Chris Jordan first stepped onto Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, in September 2009 to document “overwhelming” levels of ocean waste, little did he know that his striking image of a dead albatross chick would go viral and change the world’s response to the plastics crisis.

After taking some shots of waste piled high, Jordan was looking for a more personal way to highlight the scale of overconsumption. After hearing about an island 1,300 miles (2,100 km) northwest of Honolulu covered in thousands of dead birds, all with their stomachs full of everyday plastic items like bottle tops and toothbrushes, “I immediately felt this magnetic pull to go,” he says. He was determined to “find a way to photograph [these birds] that honoured the depth of this environmental tragedy”.

Jordan was not the first photographer to capture the impact of the plastics crisis on Midway’s albatross population. The first known photo was taken by US researchers in 1966 and published in 1969, says Wayne Sentman, a biologist and board president of the Friends of Midway Atoll organisation. Plastic ingestion is likely to cause “poor outcomes” for albatross chicks because fragments can puncture the gut wall or cause dehydration, and heavy metals and other chemicals can leach off in concentrations which may be lethal to the birds, says Sentman.

While Jordan knew of previous photos taken on Midway, he attempted to bring a more emotional dimension to his images. He likens composing photographs of these dead birds to “a grief ritual”.

“When we arrange sacred objects on an altar, there’s a way that we naturally do it, with a symmetry and balance and we might spend a lot of time doing it until it all holds together,” says Jordan. He chose to use a diffuser – a white material stretched across a frame that disperses bright light – to create a softer glow “that contributes to a feeling of a photograph that goes a little deeper”.

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When Jordan returned to Seattle, he thought he’d completed this project. “I said goodbye to the island and went home, then processed the images and put them out there.” He had no expectation that his images would go viral, long before the era of social media. But his photos quickly began appearing in magazines and newspapers all over the world. “It sort of appeared everywhere all at once,” he recalls. Tens of thousands of emails poured into his inbox, and he had to employ a full-time assistant just to answer them all. “So many people were writing a trauma response,” says Jordan. “People wanted to go to Midway and save the albatrosses, but the plastic is not coming from this island. It’s a systemic problem.”

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ART BEAT: Debra Barnhart takes her nature photography to the tumultuous Farallon Islands | Entertainment

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