Storm Traveler

There was a Helen Hunt movie a while back called "Twister" (a fairly bad movie, but hey, it had Helen Hunt in wet clothes with wet hair ... ooh). It was a story of some research scientists in the midwest area (Kansas comes to mind) that chases storms, in an effort to understand more about tornadoes, in an effort to predict when these will occur. It's kind of like what Caltech and JPL are trying to do to predict earthquakes. Anyhow, these scientists go and look for bad storms, and actually try to drive through them. Well, that's kind of how I felt as I was driving home from LA yesterday.




I left LA around 2 PM (early enough so that I could get to the Bay Area by 9 or 10 PM). It started out clear enough, with some clouds, and some blue skies. But then, the further north I drove, the more ominous it looked. I was driving right in the direction of where the storm is. I felt like I was on this scientific expedition, trying to specifically find the eye of the storm, but without any scientific gadgets and high tech equipment, just like in the movie. The other big difference ... no wet Helen Hunt by my side either. :(

This got me thinking, is there a law against taking pictures while driving? Probably not a good idea, so I tried taking them when there was no cars around. That's why you see pictures with no cars, or little amount of cars ahead of me.




As I pass through the storm, there was nothing really unique there ... just really bad weather, with torrential downpour of rain. There was no thunder or lightning, but just heavy heavy rain. In fact, it got so bad at one point, I had to slow down to about 52 mph.

After I got through the Grapevine, the rain stopped, but it was by no means sunny. It's actually pretty cool to be driving through partly cloudy conditions, as you can see some interesting mix of cloud, blue sky, and sun formations, and it is pretty unique. I had to be careful about how to take my pictures, but I did manage to get a few off.





Eventually, it got too dark outside to be able to take any more artistic style pictures, but I think this is a nice attempt to tap into the nearly void artistic part of the brain that I have. I have not attempted to photoshop these pictures by increase/decrease saturation or contrast, so these are raw images. I think the other aspect of this is actually learning what my camera can do.