Generally, I am not a diehard fan of disaster photography, though I can understand the importance to document certain occasions. However, there is something that leaves an unpleasant aftertaste in the photographs portrayed in and splayed across the news. There is too much apathy between the people on either side of the lens.

Many of the hippie generation will probably recall the infamous still-shot Children Fleeing an American Napalm Strike by Nick Ut. It was a news story captured by both still-frame photographers and cinematographers alike. The video clips were broadcast by news agencies across the world, and the pictures were reminders of the horrific scenes in the video. Both documented a group of Vietnamese children screaming and running in terror and blinding pain, with American soldiers walking beside them seemingly unaffected by the atrocity. The man to the far right is holding a camera, however, not a gun, and there were several photographers there documenting the scene. Those who were alive during the war and saw the video clip will remember, and those who did not see the video have surely seen the photograph. What the audience cannot see, and what is probably most characteristic of Western societal nature, are the excruciating burns scarring the children's backs from the napalm blast they are fleeing. What were the reporters' first reactions? Grab a camera, not a med kit. Maybe there was not one available, but for God's sake, comfort the child. If you were napalmed, would you want a camera jammed in your face to document your horrific agony, or perhaps a hand held out the bring you into a caring embrace and some soothing, though non-understandable words spoken to you?

Philip Jones Griffiths, in his Civilian Victim, Vietnam, photographed his subject after she had been treated for her injuries. This piece is just as powerful and moving, if not more so, because the bandages allude to a disastrous mystery, but lacks what Griffiths worked against in his Vietnam Inc.: the dehumanizing culture of technology. (All this information and more is available in The Photo Book listed on the Resources page, and at http://www.musarium.com/stories/vietnaminc/index.html).

But, spurned by the stories of mass power outages in Ontario after a merciless bout of electrical storms, I decided to finally try my hand at storm photography; I set-up my equipment, grabbed a couple garbage bags because we, unfortunately, do not own an umbrella (I've always loved walking in the rain), and headed out onto the raised side porch which gave me a vantage point equal to the tree line in the shot. The mosquitoes were eating me alive as if there were no other animals for thousands of miles. I felt like the character in the Farley Mowat book, Snow Walker, wherein he is attacked by a man-consuming cloud of parasitic pestilence, one so vast that entire caribou can be bled dry by a single swarm. Luckily, they were not quite that bad, but the porch was rickety, and quite obviously I was using slow shutter speeds. Thus, I was unable to flinch when, calculated, it seemed, for maximum annoyance, they would gather and bite, nor could I swat them away when they threatened to move slowly across the lens. Instead, I knelt without movement, holding above me a stretched out garbage bag to keep the frustrated, pelting rain from damaging my equipment. I am not sure exactly what settings I had on the camera/lens when I took this photograph as I was switching between shutter speeds and apertures as I tried to anticipate the storm (feebly). However, I stayed, primarily, within a f/5.6-f/16 range and used 5 to 30 second exposures depending on the saturation of light received while the shutter was open (how many strikes occurred while I held down the shutter release with a shutter release cable, which I used so as not to jiggle the camera with the force of pressing down the button).

Personally, I find the forces of nature, especially including those of the weather, to be wholly engrossing and fascinating. If you would like to read up more about storms - remember, knowledge is power, especially behind the lens - then I encourage you to visit these sites:

For general thunderstorm information: http://weathereye.kgan.com/expert/tstorms/forces.html.

For information specifically about lightning and how it is caused: http://www.enginova.com/lightning.htm.

For information concerning tornadoes: http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/NWSTornado/,

For the causes and nature of hurricanes: http://www.weatherquestions.com/What_causes_hurricanes.htm.

Also, for a special interest link, this site contains information about the relationship between global warming and the increase in hurricane activity in the Atlantic, whether or not a relationship can even be established, and the nature of that relationship if it does exist: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=181.