‘I have had horrible near-death experiences – driving away from a storm fast and thinking, at any moment, that the car may become airborne’
T
here’s a lot of luck involved when you’re chasing monsoon storms in Arizona during July or August. This was taken on a very frustrating day when I kept missing everything. When I thought it was all over, I called it a night. I was taking a shower when I heard the rumbling and I rushed to the window. I had washed the sand out of my teeth and ears, from being in the stormy desert all day, and I didn’t want to go back out, so I thought: “I’m just going to take a shot from my motel room.”
I fancy myself as an artist but Mother Nature does all the work. If there’s a tornado on a flat horizon, how do you make that artistic? It’s something I constantly struggle with. Maybe you capture the flowers bending into it. But ultimately you just go: “Click, got it.” So any time I can do something different, like this, is rewarding.
The type of thunderstorms that were happening that day are called pulse storms, which seemingly randomly go up and come down in a cycle that lasts about 30 minutes. One will pop up and you’ll drive over, but by the time you get there it’s died, and then one pops up over the spot you just left. It’s like Whac-a-Mole.
