EXPLORE | THROUGH THE LENS
WHEN YOU ARE STORM CHASING, most mornings
start off in a cheap hotel sipping bad coffee and
trying to remember where you had ended up the
night before. If all goes well, you know that later
that day you’ll be racing headlong into chaos. You
hope that you’ll also catch a moment of the sublime.
On this particular morning, we were in Wichita,
Kansas, midway through a project to photograph
the dramatic and destructive weather that barrels
across the middle of the United States every spring.
Nick Moir, our expedition leader and weather sage,
sat stooped on the edge of the bed, poring over a
litany of apps and online radars in search of a good
storm cell for us to pursue. Nick is fluent in the sub-
tle hieroglyphics of location forecasting, which are
incomprehensible to almost everyone else.
“This is it,” he said, waving his phone at the restof the crew—photographer Krystle Wright, videog-
rapher Skip Armstrong, and me. “Let’s roll out.”
We loaded the car with our gear, and off we went,
driving under cloudless blue skies for hundreds
of miles. We left that serene day behind when we
reached the fringe of our targeted storm and entered
a dark scene of clouds, distant lightning, and inter-
mittent rain. As we neared the heart of the cell, we
found ourselves contending with high winds, tor-
rential rain, and merciless hail. Krystle, at the wheel,
accelerated to get in front of the storm, but it was
moving too fast. We could barely keep pace with it.
Then we caught sight of a nightmare whipped up
by the storm: a rain-wrapped wedge tornado half
a mile to our right. The chaotic conditions made it
difficult for us to keep the monster in sight. Its shape
flickered in and out of the rain. We lost our cell phoneSTORY AND PHOTOGRAPH BY
KEITH LADZINSKIInto the
Storm
A PHOTOGRAPHER RUSHES
TOWARD THE DANGER
THAT MOST PEOPLE FLEE—
AND CAPTURES SCENES
OF SAVAGE NATURE.26 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC