Sorting through all the photos after a chasecation takes some time, choosing the best shots, processing the RAW files, putting them in order, creating an album, making some prints and so on...it's rewarding, takes you back to the moment...but it takes time.
So on Day 1 I thought I could make out a pale white, low contrast tornado several miles distant but not conclusively. See the Day 1 blog entry. I put the 100-400mm Sigma onto the Nikon Z7, pointed it at the target and fired off a couple of frames at 400mm. Now the key to taking photos of storms is to step back from the literal maelstrom and calmly keep on top of your photography discipline so that you get optimal results, the best combination of focal length, aperture, shutter speed, ISO with appropriate variations to get the best exposure. And keep checking your settings to make sure you don't wander into the sub-optimal, and of course, always shoot in RAW so that you can reprocess the shot and eek out every last bit of quality from the full data set captured by the camera.
This particular shot was overexposed by one stop along the principal of "Expose To The Right" (ETTR) which pushes the highlights but not to the point that they blow out which in turn lifts the shadows so optimising the data in the RAW file. The JPEG straight out of camera was, to be honest somewhat underwhelming and gave no indication of a tornado.
The RAW file was worked on with some brutality in Adobe Camera RAW in Photoshop. It won't win any prizes for artistic or technical merit but shows, without doubt, the presence of a tornado. Worth the time and effort for sure and shows the merit of shot discipline when the adrenaline is up. And my eyes were not deceiving me at the time.
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