WEATHER MAN

Weather

Lightning, tornadoes, hurricanes ... when the weather starts getting bad, Warren Faidley starts feeling good. No, he's not a dark knight or a prophet of doom. He's a photographer. More specifically, he's a storm photographer, and he's one of the best in the world.

WARREN FAIDLEY FROWNS as he looks at the line of thunderstorms moving along the mountains. He's not happy with the storm he's chasing. The thunderstorm is a couple of miles off to the northwest over a small range of mountains, but it's not dropping many lightning bolts, which is frustrating him. Faidley checks the Doppler radar images being displayed on his dashboard-mounted Garmin GPS, then taps his iPhone a few times and brings up the National Weather Service Web site. Satisfied with what he sees, he decides the storm is worth his time to photograph, so he parks at the edge of a farm field to set up. He extracts a Fujifilm digital camera from a heav ily padded bag and attaches a 400 mm zoom lens to it. He checks the camera's settings a couple of times and then laughs. “My camera just told me it needs a firmware update,” he says. “How does it know that?” He attaches a cable release to the camera and secures it to a tripod. He's ready to shoot. The sky flashes and the rumble of thunder resounds around him. The storm starts dropping lightning bolts at regular intervals and Faidley is deep in his element, making expo sures of about 30 seconds for each shot. “Wow,” he says, a smile creasing his face as he checks the camera's display screen. “Look at the red background on this shot. They nor mally don't do that.”Faidley is happy now. “That's what shoot ing lightning is all about,” he says, “taking shots and hoping you'll get a great one. It's always a treasure hunt.” Faidley, who's been chasing storms lightning, tornadoes, hurricanes and wildfires since the mid-1980s, is probably the coun try's best-known professional storm chaser. Most people who chase storms there aren't very many who do it for a living would have given up on this storm long ago. But it's Faidley's talent for spotting the unusual that has earned him accolades for some of the most memorable images of light ning strikes in the Sonoran Desert. Besides lightning storms, Faidley has put himself in the path of hurricanes and endured their battering winds and stinging rain to photograph their power. He's chased tornadoes across America's heartland, and witnessed the power and destruction of the terrible funnel clouds firsthand. When wildfires sweep across the West, Faidley's usu ally in a helicopter, document ing a fire's devastation. His obsession with cata strophic weather goes back to age 12, when a flash flood in Tucson nearly drowned Him and a companion. But he wasn't scared; he was fascinated. Dubbed the “storm chaser” by Life magazine in 1989 after the publication ran his now famous photograph of a multiple-branch light ning strike in Tucson, Faidley has chased storms from one end of the country to the other. “I've always had a fascination with bad weath er, from an early age,” Faidley says. “Storms of all kinds are intriguing. They're bigger than life, powerful and uncontrollable.” The shot that launched his fame was one that almost got him killed, too. When a massive lightning storm welled up over Tucson late in the summer of 1988, Faidley picked up his cameras and headed south toward the action. He set up his equipment under an overpass on Aviation Highway and got ready to document the frequent lightning strikes. He opened his camera shutter at the right moment and captured lightning striking a power pole near oil and fuel tanks off Ajo Way.

Man

"It was during the middle of the rainstorm, and lightning was striking all around me," Faidley says. "As I got the shot, I also got jolted, like getting a jolt from a 110-volt live wire."

The lightning bolt had four branches as it struck, Faidley says, with the main bolt striking the power pole and one of the branches electrifying the overpass area where he stood.

When he realized what he had, he printed the shot and sent it off to Life magazine.

"After the photo ran in Life, things changed for me overnight," he says. "I'd been shooting weddings to survive, but very quickly I had people calling me for weather shots and paying me $700 a pop."

Faidley was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1957 and escaped his first big storm, a tornado, when he was only 5. At age 9, he moved to Mobile, Alabama, when his father, an employee with the federal government, was transferred to that tropical cyclone hot zone.

Three years later, the family moved to Tucson.

"As I grew up, I went from tornado alley to hurricane alley to lightning alley," Faidley says. "When you're a kid experiencing storms, everything is so much bigger and grandiose. But as an adult, that kind of weather still has an appeal for me that is bigger than life."

Faidley graduated from high school in 1975 and attended Pima Community College before transferring to the University of Arizona, where he earned a degree in photojournalism in 1984.

After working as a stringer for local newspapers, Faidley landed a job as a photojournalist at the Tucson Citizen. He worked there for three years, but says he wanted "something a bit more exciting than shooting city council meetings and rodeos."

He began his weather photography career in 1987 when he and another staff photographer took time off to chase unusual weather to see where it might lead.

"When we got to Las Cruces [New Mexico], we heard on the radio that a Texas town had been hit hard by a tornado," says Tom Willett, Faidley's partner on that trip. "We drove to Saragosa [Texas] and documented the devastation there. More than 30 people had been killed and the town destroyed." For Faidley, the tornado's destruction left a lasting impression. He also found that shooting severe weather could be made into a career.

"At the time, stock photography companies provided a dizzying array of photos for publications," Faidley says, "and it was an extremely lucrative business. I looked into it and realized that no one was doing stock shots of weather. So I quit my job at the Citizen."

Today, storm-chasing is one of several businesses Faidley runs. He has the imaging company, and also Storm Chaser Consulting, through which he helped DuPont develop a Kev-lar storm shelter.

In addition, he published a book in 1995, Storm Chaser. He has produced a calendar of weather images each year for several years, and wrote a children's book about storms for a London publisher.

"From the very beginning, I realized how strange an occupation this would be for me," Faidley admits. "But I realized that as a journalist, there's more than simply taking a picture. I try to educate and help people understand weather through my photos."

Each kind of storm Faidley chases holds its own perils and difficulties to photograph.

With a hurricane, you know in advance where it's going, so the secret to getting good shots is being at the right place at the right time, and still surviving.

"With a hurricane, you know in advance where it's going, so the secret to getting good shots is being at the right place at the right time, and still surviving," he says.

"Shooting lightning is not that dangerous for me because I've learned where to shoot from and to know about the energy in the storm. If you know the storm structure, you'll know where the lightning is likely to come from and be ready for it."

Faidley says he has lenses up to 500 mm in focal length to shoot lightning, but often chooses a lens in the 200 mm to 400 mm range.

The most challenging kind of storm to photograph, he says, is a tornado. "It's very difficult to get a good tornado shot. You have to be within a mile or less of the funnel."

Faidley adds that even getting near a tornado can be tricky. There are about a thousand tornadoes each year in the United States. Some of them hit at night, others are very short-lived, and some happen where a photographer can't get to them. This reduces the number of tornadoes that could be photographed to just a few.

Then there's the problem of being in the right place at the right time. Tornado Alley encompasses around 400,000 square miles, taking in eastern New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming, most of Nebraska and South Dakota, Kansas, Iowa, Oklahoma and a large chunk of Texas.

"It's elusive to catch something in there," Faidley says. "Tornadoes are the most difficult storms to find, but aren't necessarily the most dangerous. The transportation part of getting to the storm is probably the most dangerous, and then the lightning that comes with the storm."

Has the 51-year-old Faidley ever been in a situation where he feared for his life?

He chuckles before he answers. "Many, many times," he says. "It happens a lot. And I tell myself I'll do it differently next time."

Does he?

"I try," he says.

Faidley says chasing storms always will be risky.

"When I shot Hurricane Andrew, the park-ing garage I was using as a shooting platform was shaking so much the cast-iron caps on the sprinkler valves were shaking off," he says. "With Hurricane Katrina, the parking garage in Biloxi we were going to shoot from would have been under water, so we were turned away before we could even get there."

Sometimes, escape routes are blocked, Faidley says, so it's critical to keep a cool head.

"The best way not to panic is to know about the subject, about the storm and its behavior."

Faidley has been injured a few times while chasing storms, most recently when he twisted his knee during Hurricane Katrina. He also carries scars on his arm from flying glass hurled by Hurricane Andrew, and a scar on his leg where a door flung by a tornado slammed into him.

"I always wear a helmet and ballistic-type goggles when I'm chasing a hurricane," Faidley says. "There's all kinds of stuff flying through the air, so you have to protect yourself. I also wear an inflatable life vest in case of getting caught in a storm surge."

But for Faidley, no matter what gear he's wearing or what photographic equipment he's using, there's nothing to compare with the adrenaline rush of chasing a big storm.

"They're elusive," he says, "but that's part of their appeal."