Camille Seaman was vacuuming her living room when the idea struck her: I should drive into the heart of a really dangerous storm.
It was during a TV show about storm-chasing, one of those behind-the-scenes mini-docs on Discovery or History, when her daughter, lounging on the couch while Seaman maneuvered the vacuum between furniture, made the playful suggestion.
"She just looked up and said, 'Hey, mom, you should do that!'" Seaman told Mashable. "And I thought, 'Yeah, this actually looks pretty fun.'"
Just three days later, Seaman was in Kansas with a team of professional storm-chasers, helping to monitor, track and photograph monstrous cloud formations as they crept across the Great Plains.
"I knew after the first day on the road that this was something I wanted to keep pursuing. I was hooked."
"I knew after the first day on the road that this was something I wanted to keep pursuing. I was hooked."
That was back in 2008. Since then, Seaman's ventured out on several other, and equally dangerous, storm-chasing trips; as always, she's returned home to Emeryville, Calif., from each journey with breathtaking photos of some of nature's eeriest handy-work. Take a look at some of the photos in the gallery above.
Now, she's collecting funds through Kickstarter to take two more trips this summer as part of the Big Cloud Project. She's already raised more than $14,000, well past her initial goal of $6,900, and still has 10 days left on the campaign.
This won't be Seaman's first big visual project. She's a photographer by day — a very distinguished one, at that — and has worked predominately in the polar region snapping photos of glaciers. For the Big Cloud project, she'll be trying to capture supercells: massive, isolated clouds (hence the name "Big Cloud") that form when warm air from the Gulf of Mexico meshes with cool jet streams from the Pacific Northwest.
"They're basically these individual clouds that appear out of nowhere," she said, "and they're huge! Some can stem up to 65,000 feet into the atmosphere and grow as wide as 50 miles."
Supercells are often thought of as gateways to tornadoes, she said, but in reality only 2% actually produce funnel clouds or full-blown twisters. She'll make two trips as part of the project, in May and in June, and travel through parts of the Texas panhandle up through Oklahoma, Nebraska and the Dakotas — ideal areas for chasing storms because of the flat terrain and proximity between jet streams.
She'll be joined by a group of storm-chasers from New Zealand and Australia in May; in June, she'll lead a photography workshop for a group of six aspiring nature photographers. Bill Reid, from Tempest Tours, will join the team for both.
Seaman stressed that it's not the type of gig for people who don't like driving. On average, a storm-chasing team can spend up to eight hours in a vehicle every day. Typically, they'll stream data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration onto their laptops in the morning, then use it to predict when and where the nearest storms will develop.
There are, of course, a number of risks that come with chasing potentially life-ending super storms. In addition to the usual ones, softball-sized hail, sidewalk-melting lightning, Seaman said the greatest danger is road accidents.
"A lot of times, when the weather gets crazy, people do stupid things when they drive," she said. "When there's a storm or tornado on the ground, people tend to pull over to the side of the road and get out of their cars. So then you have people on the side of the road, and you can literally get hit if you're not careful. When you're in that situation, other drivers are going to be looking at the giant cloud in the sky, not at the road."
Once the project ends, and she (hopefully) collects the shots she's looking for, she said she'll post them on her website and sell a few to different publications, maybe even publish a book. Her main goal, though, is to simply highlight the majestic power of Mother Nature.
"I'm really hoping these pictures raise awareness of this extreme kind of weather — not necessarily in a fearful way, but also in an awesome way," she said. "I want people to know how magnificent and powerful our planet really is. Beauty is important to me: I know most people don't ever get to see the things that I get to see, so for now, I just want people to realize how awesome our planet really is."
Learn more about the Big Cloud project on Seaman's Kickstarter page. You can stay up-to-date with her other photography on her website.
