Snowy October Night Photography in Bodie

I've shot in Bodie at night nearly 40 times. The Bodie workshop season typically runs late May through mid-October when any storms tend to be convention-driven from daytime heat. So even on stormy days, the sky usually clears up at night. This time, in early October, a light storm not driven by daytime heat moved through, at first driving broken clouds to move through our shots of the Milky Way, then thickening to create trails of uneven clouds back-lit by green airglow.
 
The Milky Way was mostly out for the first hour, then coming and going with streaks of clouds for about an hour, then then the clouds were translucent with intermittent snow showers. The snow never stuck to the ground much, but it was cool to have streaking through our shots. Fortunately everyone else was really into it too It was chilly with the wind blowing, but every shot was different, so we worked fast, and right through the end, when we could barely get out on time!






One participant decided to leave in case the snow showers became more intense. His red brake lights were reflecting off of the low clouds above.

Weather Timelapse: Lenticular Clouds in the Eastern Sierra

A few nights ago I watched lenticular clouds form over the Three Sisters in the Sweetwater Range, across Topaz Lake on the California/Nevada border in the Eastern Sierra. It looked like a little sunset light might get through, so I took a few photographs, and set up my camera to capture a time-lapse sequence of several hundred more, so I could convert them into a video.

As the direct sunlight left the scene and the light faded towards the blue light of twilight, is looked like the cloud cover was too thick, and sunset simply wasn't going to happen.

Then a hint of orange started to appear, and brighten, at the bottom of the stack of clouds.



I reframed the image to capture detail of the evolving light over the Three Sisters.

The sunset light was brief, but intense, and the roughly 1000 photos that I took to capture the moment payed off!

I processed a few hundred of the images into a time-lapse video so you could see the whole event.  Here's the best edit I've produced so far:

Storm Chasing in Nevada

Sunset storm over the Cambridge Hills in Lyon County, Nevada

Smith Valley south of Wellington

At Topaz Lake on the California/Nevada border,  and I had a storm pass by earlier this month.  There was lighting over by Wellington in Smith Valley, so we decided to chase it east into Smith Valley to see if we could catch some lightning photos. 


We saw some flashes of lightning in the distance, but it was way ahead of us.  We didn't catch the storm in Smith Valley; it continued over the next set of mountains to Mason Valley, south of Yerington.


So we headed through Wilson Canyon and once in Mason Valley headed south, ending up in the Cambridge Hills as the skies cleared towards the setting sun, and "golden hour" color spread under the storm clouds. 

Crepuscular rays, sun rays, were streaming down past the clouds.  I had to pull over to catch a quick hand-held picture.

The storm was to the west, the sun was shining under it from the east, and we were under the edge, which ran north and south.

I continued on to where I knew there was an old stone building in the Cambridge Hills mining district that could serve as s good foreground subject.  The light was perfect with a dark, shadowy hill in the middle and the clouds breaking up, revealing a mountain in the distance.

We headed west over the hills, but the country was opening up and there would be few foreground subjects, so we backtracked briefly to shoot toward the sun.  We turned north on a two track side road through the sagebrush, and at some point had to simply stop and make do with whatever foregrounds we could compose, as the light was going off, and it would't last.


We had some great opportunities as the sun went from yellow to orange and shot light under the storm clouds, while the clouds to the east of us started to take on shades at the blue end of the spectrum (above).  

When you mix cool and warm tones, blue cloud-diffused light with orange to red sunset tones, you can get shares of purple, pink and magenta.  Some people don't believe that those tones happen in the sky in real life, but there they were, and they were consistently captured across multiple cameras.  

When the best of the color was past, and the sky darkened and faded a bit, I could  slow down, start to put away my DSLR, and see what  smartphone could do with what was left.  A panorama seemed appropriate to show the transition into the darkness under the storm.

We stuck around to capture a time-lapse of the clouds moving as the storm dissipated, and as the nearly-full moon rose behind them.

We never did catch up to the storm of capture any lightning shots, but we sure found some great conditions that we never could have anticipated!  Sometimes showing up is what it takes to see the amazing things that happen all around us every day. 

Last golden hour light before the sky went crazy.

Seasons of Topaz

Seasons of Topaz, my latest time-lapse video,with "Sierra Wave" lenticular clouds, pogonip ice fog, rain, snow, sunrises, sunsets... a year's worth of weather in 3 minutes: http://youtu.be/W07_Yol2Ad4


The music, used with permission, is "Odyssey" (instrumental version) by The Wyld, as heard in the McDonald's commercials during the Sochi Winter Olympics.  Drop by their Web site for links to their social media pages where you can say "Hi": http://thewyldmusic.com/