A brief description until I can work up a better one; this is the day that these storms took the lives of several famous national television 'storm chasers' that are on the news right now and around a dozen people in total -- many of whom were in their vehicles. It was a very, very dangerous day.
Traditionally, tornadoes travel from the southwest to the northeast -- it's just something you know if you live in 'tornado alley' long enough. Well, the tornadoes this day were repeatedly travelling south, south southeast, etc. which was deadly for some and caught other very experienced 'storm chasers' by surprise.
I've never gone 'storm chasing' myself previously. This was a decision made after I was sent home early from work due to these storms and I threw my cameras and gps in the car and took off to see if I might capture anything from a 'safe distance.'
I may never do it again, but as you will hear there was a lot of talk and advice about getting out of the way of these storms by driving and these did end up coming very near my home. So, I may have been better off mobile and keeping aware. I did try to stay a healthy distance ahead, but as you will see -- I repeatedly found myself with another ominous looking storm breathing down my neck and a near traffic jam ahead of me with people fleeing the path of the storm and others appearing to be coming out to watch them. I didn't capture any of the big damaging tornadoes and that is just fine with me actually. I was way too close too many times. I did capture some pretty scary looking formations, wall clouds, etc.
At any rate; there is a brief write-up regarding the experience. This is a 'rough edit' of the video that I got. It was pretty laborious just to splice this much together and encode/upload after a long night of evading the storms. The GoPro was totally a last minute decision -- I've never used it in my car shooting from inside to the outside. Thus, the less than perfect arrangement that I ended up with it, but the video still came out better than I would have expected and I intend to see about some post color correction on it to see if perhaps the images could be improved from the flat 'Protune' profile they were shot in that leave those skies a little lifeless. I found that a few other experimental setups didn't work out; camcorder on Gorillapod on top of the car while it was running just threw the autofocus into dysfunctional searching for focus. Go figure. The vibration?
Dedicated to the Natural Wonders of Amanda Seyfried.
Edit Update: This was just announced on the local news to have been the 'Widest Tornado In History'
I've seen several comments about 'I don't see any tornado in this video.' So, if it helps you (I'm sure it doesn't) -- I'll try to put this in perspective a little possibly.
This is a link to a Google Earth screenshot of where the path of the tornado travelled and the locations that I filmed from while stationary. Don't know what to tell you all. It was 2.6 miles wide and I was 5 miles away from it. That's what it looked like and it was plenty close enough for me: http://flic.kr/p/eE6VLu
Question what your concept is of seeing something that is 2.6 miles wide from 5 miles away. This is what the 'widest tornado in history' looked like from these exact locations in relation to the point on the map that I believe to be where I captured it according to the radio broadcasts during that timeframe.
Look at the picture used by the LA Times to depict their story on it.... http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-el-reno-tornado-20130604,0,7917299.story
