June 10th Coffey County Kansas

DISCLAIMER:  I count chase days by calendar days and since these were taken about 1:30 am on the 10th...you get the picture.

As I was heading to Kansas City for the night.  I stopped to take some shots of a couple of severe storms south of my location at the Waverly, KS exit off I35.  Was kinda fun as I played around with different exposure settings to see what I would come up with.  I did not have the long exposure noise reduction turned on.  As you can see, there is still some noise but not as bad as I thought it would be.  At some point I'll go through and use Noise Ninja to remove what little there is.

There was quite a bit of lightning and boosting the exposure compensation to +3.0 really gave a cool effect to the storm for a 30s exposure while not blowing out the stars above it.   Unfortunately the moon had not come up over the storm yet as that would have been even better.

I have always admired my friend, Mike Hollinghead, and his talent to take the oridinary and make it unordinary..especially when it comes to night shots.  The next thing to try would be to get some fire flies in the same image as the lightning and the stars.  Got a little success but the outflow winds blowing to the west from the storms kept the little buggers pretty close to the ground and out of the frame.

A few more fire flies but still not what I was hoping for.  Headed to Kansas City for the night and really pooched myself after looking at conditions the next morning decided  heading back to Colorado wasn't an option and I didn't think the boundary sitting southeast of Kansas City would do much so I headed back north by mid-morning.  Boy was I wrong.  Check out this INSANE video from Andy Gabrielson @  www.findthetornado.com shot later the afternoon of the 10th on the boundary I gave up on.

2009 Chases Main Page