By Holly Stuart Hughes

Fine-art photographer Camille Seaman shot the images in her latest project, "The Big Cloud," last summer on a storm-chasing tour from central Texas through North Dakota. Like her previous project, "The Last Iceberg," which she shot over several years in the Arctic and Antarctica, Seaman's new series captures the awe-inspiring  power of nature. But as Seaman explains in our Exposures feature in PDN's May issue, photographing super-cell storms—the storm clouds that can produce hail, lightning and, at times, tornados—presented a different set of logistical and technical challenges.

"The hard part is that I had no idea how dark it gets under those things," says the Berkeley, California-based photographer. "In a lot of the pictures, the grass seems lit, but the sky is dark." That's because these are isolated clouds that are not part of a front or weather system. They form rapidly as warm, humid air moves north and west from the Gulf of Mexico.  As its rotation draws in more air, the cloud can reach heights of 70,000 feet, blocking out the afternoon sun. "If you storm chase correctly, you don't even get wet," Seaman says, "You want to be in just this certain area: behind the action in the southwest corner of the storm." 

Seaman got her first lesson in how to photograph lightning from one of the dedicated storm-chasers she met on the tour. "You put the camera on 'bulb' setting. You keep your finger pressed to keep the shutter open and as soon as the lighting happens, you let go, which closes the shutter. You’ve got the perfect lightning exposure." Of course, that's how she was almost struck by lightning. "I was lucky. My basalt Gitzo tripod has no metal in it, so it couldn't act as a lightning rod."

One of the most humbling experiences of her storm-chasing tour, Seaman says, was stopping in Greensberg, Kansas, a city that was leveled by a tornado that killed 11 people in May 2007. When the caravan of storm-chasers would pull into a diner in one of the small towns in Tornado Alley, Seaman says, locals were unhappy to see them, "because it’s a bad omen for them. They would say, 'Is it coming this way?' "

But Seaman sees the clouds she photographed as more complex than simply a source of destruction. "In that force is also creation," she says.

She adds, "Hopefully in my life, that will be the line that goes through everything that I do. I'm really trying in a positive way to show people a connection to their environment."

For more on Camille Seaman's project, see "The Gathering Storm" in the May issue of PDN.  Seaman's exhibit "The Last Iceberg" is on view at Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica and OpenShutter Gallery in Durango, Colorado until May 30, 2009 and at Hoopers Gallery in London until July 3, 2009.