5/21/07 Colorado Chase Report

WOW, what a wonderful surprise. This was simply a travel day with hopes of maybe bagging some decent lightning near the Kansas border. We had nothing better to do so we hung around the storms that fired east of Limon. The storms kicked up a large amount of outflow dust and Jon Merage filmed a decent gustnado somewhere west of Burlington Colorado. A huge line of storms formed as outflows from earlier storms clashed. This new line of storms put the earlier dust farting rain showers to shame. As we approached Burlington, a fantastic sunset began to take shape . The amount of dust in the air created fantastic colors as the sky began to erupt in flame. I was in my element as I have never had a chance to photograph anything as beutiful as this. I shot over 100 images of this sunset, many of them bracketed exposures for HDR combinations. I put together a preliminary HDR shot of this at the hotel and the results are stunning. I will upload HDR shots when I save up the cash to purchase Photomatix. The single exposures by themselves are plenty entertaining. These shots have not been edited aside from resizing.


Fantastic, looking west from northern BurlingtonThis produced a suspicious cone shaped lowering. The beginnings of this can be seen on the right side of the image, just above the watermark.

The HDR version of this is absolutely sexy