Chasing Storms with the Sony A7S | Greg Johnson

My name is Greg Johnson. I'm a storm chaser photographer and I'm based out of Regina, Saskatchewan. I was just telling the Johns down here that coming to Toronto from a guy from Saskatchewan, your traffic sucks. There's like nine people in the town where I'm from, so this is a different world for me. It's my first time to Profusion. A little bit humbled because my photography technique is a little bit different, and I'm going to share with you how I approach photography. It may not be what you're expecting. The essence of what I do is capturing what we refer to as the world's most extreme images. We try to get as close as we possibly can to the most dangerous winds on planet Earth. Our truck that you can see over in the Sony booth has been inside the largest tornado ever recorded on Earth. It happened on May 31st, 2013 in Oklahoma, and that's too close. It turns out the photos that you get inside of a tornado are actually quite blurry. They're not very good, and you're in the fetal position on the floor in the front seat holding the camera out the window. It's not a good spot to be. Our goal is to get as close as we can safely, and more importantly, for anybody who's done media photography, editorial, newspaper, that kind of thing, it's one thing to get the story, it's one thing to get the shot, but it's a much more important thing to get out to tell that story and to share those images. So what I'm going to do today is take you through the full gamut of storm chasing and how we capture our images. I want you to interrupt me whenever you feel necessary. If you have questions, feel free to throw them at me. I feel like all the people that left early are missing out, so we're going to give you guys the opportunity to ask any questions.

Did you need my background as a photographer? Like a lot of people, I started in high school newspaper and university, shot weddings when I was younger, and I've got four kids of my own. I shot for the Hockey Hall of Fame for ten years, so I have a very vast variety or eclectic variety of experiences when it comes to photography. But whether I'm shooting weddings, storms, my kids playing their own hockey games, or just hanging out in the park with my children, my goal is the same every time I pick the camera up out of the bag. I think it's really the essence of what photography is for most people: I want to tell a story. Every time I pick up the camera, it's about telling a story. For example, when shooting weddings, we always try to tell stories. This was a real moment in time. A bride and groom had rented a nice old car, we did wedding photos, we came back to the car, we got a flat tire. Now it's his wedding day. I'm not going to make the groom change his own tire on his wedding day. Whether you love the photo, hate the photo, or recognize that it's a setup, this is a setup. But whether you love it or hate it, for this couple this was a real moment in time. It's an actual moment, and I could tell by the reaction everyone had a good chuckle over it. It's funny. We have an emotional connection to that photo. I think that the best images in the world are the ones that give us some kind of emotion. They give us a laugh, they make us cry, they tell stories. Storytelling to me is paramount. How about this photo? If you're not laughing at this, you're wrong. That's a one-minute-old baby giving me the finger. That's my youngest daughter Gabby. Imagine how much fun we're going to have at her wedding. That's good stuff. That's the essence of photography. It's those moments. I took about 500 photos that morning, but I'm going to tell you the world has only ever seen one shot. The reason is because that's the one shot that really has an emotional connection. Outside of my wife and myself and maybe my parents, really nobody else cares about a photo of a baby because it's just a photo of a baby. We all have photos of babies, we all have seen photos of babies. But a baby giving the finger, that's good stuff. How about this one? It's got a different emotional connection. This is a small town in Nebraska in 2014, and that's an EF-4 tornado. That's a tornado with wind speeds approaching 400 kilometers an hour. What you're seeing in this image is about 150 homes and 15 businesses flying up in the air. It's a different emotion, but it's an important and compelling story. This isn't just some small town in Nebraska. It's actually the town of Pilger, Nebraska. I know that because I took the photo and I was there 300 yards away, and I watched people's lives changing in that very instant. We documented the stories of people who survived the tornado, how they recovered. We've been back several times to follow up on those stories. I met a guy this day, guy by the name of Jean Willers. This guy's close to retirement, he runs the bank in town. On that day, imagine this scene: he looks out the front door of the bank, the bank's on Main Street, looks out the front door and he sees this tornado with homes literally flying up in the air. He sees this tornado coming towards the bank. He's got nine people, customers and employees, in the bank. They have no storm shelter, no basement. So he makes this decision. Imagine this decision as a human being. He takes those people, he opens up the vault door, he puts nine people in the vault. But somebody's got to close and lock the door, so he stays out, closes and locks that door, and then tries to find somewhere to hide as the bank gets hit by the tornado. He survived. It's an amazing story, it's a compelling story. Images for me are what's important. Here's what you're going to hear from me today about technical stuff: I don't even talk about it. I shoot JPEG. I shoot wide open apertures exclusively, 2.8 or better. I shoot high ISO. If I zoom in on this really tight, it's actually got quite a lot of texture to it, a lot of grain. See how I use texture? This photo's got texture. But here's why I do that. A lot of times we're driving in that truck, the truck's driving 120 kilometers down the highway, 120 kilometers an hour. I'm shooting from the passenger window and I'm trying to get sharp images to tell a story. No one cares about the fact that technically those images have texture, have grain, have noise, whatever you want to call it. Nobody cares about things like depth of field. One of my favorite photos I've ever taken is completely out of focus. Not completely, but it's out of focus. I've realized over the years doing this that the images that stand out for people are not always the most technically proficient, but the moments are the ones that matter.

I'm going to show you a quick video here of 15 minutes of storm chasing. I've compressed it into one minute, so it's a time-lapse type thing. It's shot with an action cam, one of those you can mount on the dashboard of the car or on the windshield. It's mounted on the front of our production truck that's following us. That's our truck in the video. Our production truck's following along. On the hood of the truck we've mounted an action cam, and this video comes from that action cam. But what I want you to notice is when you see us get out of the vehicle and take pictures, my world exists in six-second blocks. Six seconds, maybe ten seconds if I'm lucky. You've got to get the shot. It's got to be exposed correctly, it's got to be in focus. Those things are paramount. But it's six seconds. If you think about all the really good stuff that we get to shoot in life, your Uncle Bill as he's walking into the church, he's supposed to bring all the flowers and he trips and falls and flowers go over. That's a short block. Your camera's got to be ready to go. The first kiss at a wedding, your kid riding the bike for the first time without the training wheels. It doesn't matter, you don't have to be shooting storms. All the really good stuff in life happens in these short windows, these short blocks. So I want you to get a sense of what shooting looks like in my world.

And it's also a shameless plug for our television show, which airs Sunday nights at 9:00 PM on CMT. I know you've all watched it. I think that video highlights for you, imagine that as we're in that environment, it's very windy, there's rain happening. We don't know how long that storm's gonna last. That tornado could have dissipated at any point, it could have grown at any point. We literally don't know how it's going to behave. So being ready to shoot is of the utmost importance. I've recently switched to mirrorless camera technology from DSLR. Who are the DSLR users in the room? You're thinking, 'Insane, what are you doing? You can't do that. Mirrorless, that's crazy talk.' But the camera is a fraction of the size. I went from carrying three bodies in the front seat of the truck, one with a big 70-200, one with a 24-70, and one with a 14-24 lens, and big honking digital SLR bodies, to carrying three small mirrorless bodies. I used to think using that live view, I used to go, 'Oh man, I'll never use that live view. Pro photographers don't use live view. Live view's for chumps.' And now I find exclusively when I'm on the road and I'm pointing the camera out the window, I'm not worried about the technical aspects of the imagery. What I'm worried about is that moment. So I literally will just spin the exposure dial. Oh, it's too bright, it's too dark. Within a second I've got exposure. I don't have to take a test photo. I just start firing the camera, 30, 40, 50, 60 frame bursts. I like to say, my favorite thing to say when I'm talking to people about my style or my technique of shooting, I like to say I've got the highest failure rate in the room. Because typically at the end of a day like this day after Pilger, I sold one photo. So one photo. But it had to be a photo that absolutely captured everything of that moment, the essence of that moment. So my failure rate that day was about 9,000 failed photos. Some of them are great, but no one will ever see them. That's just sort of my style. I know it's not for everybody, but that's kind of how I operate. I say all the good stuff of life happens when we take risks. When a guy who chases storms stands in front and talks about taking risks, we immediately assume I'm talking about risk in my life. But I'm not. I'm talking about the risk I took was switching from DSLR to mirrorless, because pro photographers don't use mirrorless. 'What are you talking about? You can't do that.' And I can tell you that I would never go back now because of some of the advantages I've seen, specifically in focusing technology and in the high ISO. Some of these images I've shown you, and I'm going to go there in a second, but some of the images I'm going to show you, I've shot at, and I routinely, if I pull the camera out of the bag right now, I can pretty much guarantee that the default ISO on the cameras is 10,000. A few years ago that was unheard of. When I first started shooting digital in 1999, I had a Nikon D1. My top ISO where I would not consider shooting above was 400. And even 400 back then was grainy, it was not great. And I'm routinely now shooting at 10,000, 12,000, 25,000 ISO. The camera goes up to 409, it gets a little noisy at 409, but at 12,000 ISO I literally get sellable, fantastic images. All the good stuff in life happens when we take risks. I met this guy last year. When I was growing up, Rick Hansen and Terry Fox were my childhood idols. They were on a pedestal here. These were the greatest people ever. And last year I had this opportunity, imagine this, my childhood idol, I got to travel across Canada on a speaking tour with Rick Hansen. We hit 12 different cities. We flew together, we had meals together, we had a chance to talk and get to know each other. I call Rick a friend now. Rick heard me speak several times. One day I came off the stage and I said, 'Rick, what do you think?' He says, 'Greg, there's something missing from your presentation. You chase storms for a living and you show cool photos and cool video, and people are jazzed up by it, but they think it's kind of a cowboy thing, that you're adrenaline-fueled, you've got no regard for your own personal safety, and that you're just... it doesn't make sense.' But he says, 'I know you, and I've heard you speak, and I know that's not the case. The message that you need to include is there's a difference between taking risks and being reckless.' For example, when I switched to mirrorless, I didn't leave the other cameras at home at first. That first trip, it was a process. I got into it over time. We drive a bulletproof truck with a roll cage, designed so that if you're in a mine collapse, the truck won't be crushed. We've got real-time Doppler radar. I've got speed dials to some of the best meteorologists on planet Earth. We don't treat what we do in a reckless manner. We understand what we're doing and we've got the right tools to do it. It was an important distinction because it turns out over the next few years we were gonna have some experiences that were pretty mind-blowing, some of the most impressive storms that have ever been recorded. And I happen to have a front-row seat. In some cases, from where I'm standing now, the other side of this hall would have been considered far away. We were really close. This is an EF-4 tornado in Kansas. It was on the ground for 100 kilometers. At times we were within a hundred yards, 50 yards of it. The images are really spectacular and I love them. This is another one from Oklahoma a couple years ago. Here's a little bit about tornado science. Here's how it works. Has anybody seen the greatest movie ever made, Twister? Anybody? Okay. So in the movie Twister, if you believe that Hollywood always gets it right, which they do of course, they always get it right. If you watch Twister, you would believe that in this environment it's windy, there's stuff flying at us. Nothing could be further from the truth. I rarely have to clean the lens of the camera because as we're looking at a tornado, the wind is actually hitting us from behind. Tornadoes are like a micro low-pressure system. Think of it like a black hole. Everything's being sucked in towards the funnel. So as I'm shooting the tornado, the back of my head, my clothes, everything is soaked, but the front element of the lens is dry. Our safety officer Ricky, who's wearing the flip-flops right here, that's our safety officer. He's actually holding the door of the truck open there because at this distance away from a tornado, wind speeds are probably 100 kilometers an hour at our back. So without him holding the door open, the door slams shut. There's a flock of birds up here in the corner. We actually watched that flock of birds get sucked into that funnel. So everything gets pulled in. But where does it go? It goes up. So what you're going to see in some of the later pictures is that the tornado doesn't spin around like this, it actually corkscrews and things get lifted up. So when we're in this environment, our fear is never that we're going to get stuff sort of flying at us in our face. Our fear is that we're going to go vertical. So there's kind of a sweet spot where we get close enough to get the really good images, but not so close that we end up in the air. Going back to my six-second block thing, I'm out of the truck taking this picture. This was a 15-second photo shoot. Everything on this day led up to these 15 seconds. I got shots in front of the truck, ran to the back of the truck so the image wasn't obscured by the goofy orange pumpkin truck. But it was a 15-second experience. One time around the truck taking shots, back in the passenger seat, and then off we go. As I said, it is bulletproof, crushproof. It's built to go off-road. Again, the whole idea is not just about getting close and getting the images, but making sure that we get back home at the end of the day, that we can get those images out. When it comes to media sales, I have at the maximum a 10-minute window. So we may still be chasing, I may still have a tornado on the ground and I may still be shooting, but I'm downloading over here and uploading a selected image or selected images to my media broker, who is then marketing them while we're still on the chase. Why do I have a 10-minute window? Because y'all got cameras and you all got iPhones, and everybody does. There's no such thing as exclusive content anymore. So the first person to market with good breaking news footage wins the game. If that breaking news footage happens to come from an iPhone, they're gonna buy it from the iPhone. If it happens to come from a really nice camera, they'll buy that. But the point is, first to market wins the game. You can see that we run in the truck these called cube cameras. These actually run to decks that are in the television production studio, which is housed underneath the back seat in the floor. We have point-of-view cameras on the dashboard as well, and then we're running action cams on the exterior of the truck. The whole truck is wired for audio, which means if I break wind in the truck, everybody hears it. There's cameras always pointing at us, so I learned the hard way about picking your nose when you're driving and stuff like that. You can't do it because somebody's going to make fun of you. It's a different world. Getting wired up every morning after you get dressed and then spending the whole day wired, it's kind of weird. My passion is storms. I love night shooting. I shoot a lot of stars and aurora, night storms, that kind of thing. Again, one of the real benefits of shooting at high ISOs in these environments is the ability to have faster shutter speeds. So instead of doing long exposures, I often shoot shorter, faster shots, a faster frame rate, shorter time frames on the exposures. That allows me to remove what we call ghosting in images. So when you shoot lightning, if you have more than one lightning strike in a shot, the cloud has moved during that time in between lightning strikes, and the lightning actually is your light source, so it'll actually ghost the clouds and it almost looks like bad Photoshop when you've got multiple lightning strikes. So we tend to shoot at a faster frame, and we can only do that because of the higher ISOs. Here you can see the truck rigged up with lots of different cameras on the outside. The roll cage actually doubles as basically a giant camera rig. So depending on the day, we'll actually change the camera positions on the outside of the truck from scene to scene, from shot to shot. In the morning we'll set it up, and then in the afternoon we'll change it. The reason is that the more dynamic range of shots you have, the more interesting the produced television show looks. So that becomes a big part of what we do. This is kind of my sweet spot, being underneath the storm in the evening, getting a chance to get out in a field and watch a storm moving towards you. Honestly, there's no place I'd rather be on Earth than underneath a thunderstorm.

When I first started taking storm photos, it was an adrenaline-fueled passion. I really liked being in that environment. It was like a gambling addiction. Even if I caught a really great shot, I just kept putting chips down on the table. I wanted to get another good one. I would hit the jackpot and then spend the next four days trying to hit another jackpot. All of that kind of changed for us back in 2012. Up to that point, it was all about the photography passion and the drive to get that shot. But on this particular day, it was Canada Day, July 1st, 2012. We had a storm that was producing 200 lightning strikes every minute. It was just about 60 kilometers west of the city of Regina where I live, and it was moving down Highway 1 towards Regina. This was at 9 PM. It was scheduled to hit the capital city of Saskatchewan at 10 PM. 30,000 people are in the park waiting for the fireworks to start at 10 o'clock, and we've got a storm that's dropping 200 lightning strikes every minute. We phoned ahead to the authorities and said, 'This is what's coming your way. You have a choice of firing the fireworks off now or putting people in a very deadly situation.' Even though a dumb photographer was making that phone call, because we were observing with real eyeballs on the ground what was happening, we all of a sudden turned into part of the link in the chain of emergency management. It was really cool because they fired the fireworks off at 9:15. By 10 o'clock, the park was empty. Over the course of the next few years, that became our number one goal. So today when we're out storm chasing, you'll see that if you watch the show, the first call we make is to 911. The second call we make is to the Environment Canada storm reporting line. Then we go about the work of what we're trying to do. Because at the end of the day, even though the images are what I'm passionate about, the human component obviously for all of us would trump all of that stuff. So this was my favorite shot. Was anybody with my Sony presentation earlier? Okay, so you've heard this joke. This was my favorite shot last year. It was shot at a little town in Saskatchewan called Climax, Saskatchewan. This was my last shot of the night at Climax, Saskatchewan. You get it? Okay, good. Thank you for laughing. I appreciate that. This is the poopy pants shot. A moment I shot this, I invented a tornado hunter approved underwear in brown and yellow. It was way too close. On this particular day, all the lightning strikes were happening over here, probably a mile and a half, two miles away, and that's what I was focusing on. Then we had the one random rogue lightning strike. Clearly it's overexposed a little bit, but it put the fear of God in me. I quickly got in the truck and found a different location to shoot at. Let me explain to you. Let me start this way. The most common question I get about storm chasing, absolutely top of the pile, is 'Greg, why do you have to get so close?' And I'm like, 'Mom, it's an economic reason.' So let's paint a picture here. Here's the essence of selling photos in today's economy. As a photographer working freelance, selling photos, here is the economy in a nutshell. This photo of this tornado, the tornado is on the ground for over 100 kilometers, it's close to a mile wide at times, wind speeds at 400 kilometers an hour. This is one of the longest track tornadoes ever recorded on Earth. From 14 kilometers away, this photo was taken from 14 kilometers. That was my distance away from the storm. I made 50 bucks. But about 10 minutes later, we're just about 500 yards away. Now you can actually see these heavy black areas are the earth being lifted off the ground. You can see debris flying around in the air, and you get a real sense now of the intensity of the storm. The video footage is what made us the most money from this because at this distance you can actually see things flying around in the air. This is worth a few thousand dollars. But about 20 seconds later, we're now within a hundred yards of the storm, 150 yards. You can see the asphalt being ripped off the highway surface. You can see individual trees flying around. You're thinking to yourself, 'Who are these idiots right here?' A photo like this makes our season. This pays for our year of storm chase season. A photo like this gets published around the world. So the answer to my mom is an economic one. 'Mom, the reason we have to get closer is I gotta pay the mortgage.' She hates that answer, but it's true. I get asked about police. 'Greg, you guys must drive very, very fast. Storms driving away, getting away, you must drive really, really fast. Do you ever get stopped by the cops?' Yes, we do. But not for the reason that you think. This particular shot was at Buffalo, Oklahoma, in 2011. Storm chasing is actually a really bad description of what we do. We actually don't chase after the storms. Rarely is that a good way to handle things. You end up in the rain. What we actually do is we position ourselves in front of the tornado, and then as the tornado gets dangerously and uncomfortably close, we get in the truck, we reposition to a new vantage point, and then the tornado comes towards us. Then when it gets close enough again, we reposition. So it's kind of like a little game of leapfrog that we play with the storm. On one of our chases in Oklahoma, we're on our repositioning move, and I look over at Ricky and he's white-knuckling it, his face is like... I'm like, 'Dude, what is wrong?' 'We're out of gas.' I'm like, 'How out of gas?' He was like, 'We shouldn't be moving right now.' I look at the GPS and up in front of us there's a little town, Buffalo, Oklahoma, just a few miles up the road. So we got there on fumes. We start pumping gas. We do kind of a NASCAR pit stop. One guy gets out, starts pumping the gas. Second guy goes into the store for chips, pop, beef jerky, all the necessities of life. One guy uses the bathroom. Then one guy pays for the gas. We do this. As we're finishing our pit stop, the tornado sirens in the town start going off, and everybody starts scattering. They have these public storm shelters in Oklahoma, so everyone in town starts going for the public storm shelter. We get in the car, we are in the truck, we start heading down the road. As you can see, the tornado is right over top of the road. We get about three miles out of town, and the cherries of Oklahoma state troopers pulling us over. He comes up to the side of the truck, and I'm like, 'Officer, you can't be pulling us over for speeding. There's a tornado on the ground.' He's like, 'I'm not pulling you over for speeding, but a truck matching your truck's description just stole gas in Buffalo.' It was my job to pay for the gas, and with all the commotion I forgot all about it. But here's how the relationship works. I gave that guy 50 bucks. He's like, 'I'm not worrying about this.' I gave him 50 bucks, he took it, and he paid for our gas. Well, he says he took it to pay for gas after his shift was over. But we get stopped all the time by law enforcement. The reason is that poor guy whose job it is to look after public safety, he's looking at his iPhone weather app just like anybody else, and he sees our truck, he sees our radar, and he just wants to know, 'What do I need to know about this storm?' So we have this great relationship with law enforcement. 2015, the largest tornado in North America this year actually happened on the Canadian side of the border, happened back in July. We were down at the Arizona-Mexico border on a Saturday morning. We drove straight through to get on a Monday to get to Manitoba. We show up in Manitoba, it's about 5:00, 6:00 in the evening, and we've got a great storm in front of us. A tornado warning goes off. We get out of the truck and I'm taking some landscape shots. I look above me, and my camera angle on this photo is straight above my head. I'm like, 'Guys, we're in the right spot. Looks good here.' Within a few minutes, that turned into a tornado on the ground. Over the course of the next two hours, the tornado was on the ground for two hours and unfortunately ripped through half a dozen farmyards. Very low population area, which was fortunate. But we had to stop at a number of farmyards to make sure everybody was okay. This is one of them. You can see in the foreground, at times the tornado actually had multiple fingers dangling down. It was actually quite dark. One thing you're going to notice about the image is it does have some texture, some grain to it. I'm shooting at 12,000 ISO. My goal here, remember, I'm shooting from a moving car in this case through the windshield. I don't want to miss that moment. If I'm trying to technically manage the camera's ISO and apertures and shutter speeds and all those kind of things, I'm gonna miss that shot every time. So the methodology for me is 12,800 ISO, f/2.8, probably 1/500th of a second shutter speed, and then I'm firing bursts through the windshield. A lot of frames with the windshield wipers got caught in it, but the goal is to get one shot which captures the essence of that moment. The storm was so strong that it ripped the asphalt off the highway. There were a number of times we actually stopped to capture images. As you can see, we're in a driving rain at this point. It sounds crazy, but I can't even begin to tell you how alive you feel and how exciting it was. I know that might seem weird for some people, but I love it.

In 2014, I had a moment that every photographer who's ever picked up a camera dreams of. Every photographer who's ever dreamed about getting a shot that no one else on Earth can get. I had that experience. Never before on Earth has it been witnessed: two EF-4 tornadoes on the ground at the same time right beside each other. We were fortunate to have front-row seats and be one of a handful of vehicles. I was the only stills photographer in the area. We were able to witness twin EF-4 tornadoes, sometimes one on one side of the road, one on the other side of the road. We followed them for about an hour and 20 minutes and were able to capture some truly incredible images that showed off the power and the devastation left in the wake of these storms. But I want to talk about moments. A moment like this, we had a shot. Again, I'm shooting in a moving vehicle out the passenger window, and we watched this tornado pass through a farmyard. We watched roofs flying up in the air, we watched bins being destroyed, watched trees getting ripped apart. As we pulled up to this house, people are literally getting out of that storm shelter, they call them in Oklahoma and Kansas. They're opening the door and coming out of this hole in the ground, looking at the scene in front of them which literally 30 seconds earlier was their home and their life. I get asked all the time about the creep factor. 'What's the creep factor, Greg, when you show up at a disaster scene and then you pull the camera out and you're taking pictures of people in that situation? Does it get creepier than that?' I'm going to tell you that I've never once been made to feel that way by anyone. But it's also about our approach to storm chasing, our approach to the documentary side of it. I don't just hop out of the truck with the cameras blazing and throw it in people's face. The first thing that comes out is our personal emotion. I can tell you that it's emotional for us watching that happen, and we share that with them. We'll give them a hug, we'll be immersed in that environment. If they need assistance, we'll do that. Then I'll maybe go back to the truck at some point after having talked to them for a while and say, 'Hey, can we get some pictures? Can you tell us your story on camera?' People are always happy to do it. I'll highlight that with one story. Last year, we were following this tornado in Arkansas. This happened right before dark. The balance of the lifecycle of this tornado happened in the dark. Here's how chasing operates in the dark. I've got a radar printout on my screen on my laptop, a radar image that I'm looking at. Because it's pitch black out, we actually can't see the tornado. The tornado is not visible to our eye unless there's a good lightning flash on the back side of the tornado which silhouettes it for us. But here's how we actually visually follow the storm as it passes in front of the power grid. Power lines, that kind of thing, transformers explode into this big green-white flash arc on the horizon. So as we're looking at our radar, we're actually following the explosions and getting a visual of where the tornado is. So we're doing this in Arkansas this night. I'm following the storm and I'm looking at the radar, and it's about to hit three towns. There's a northeast road and there's three towns on there, and the tornado is going right along the path to hit these three towns. We showed up at the third of three towns about five minutes after the tornado had hit. What you're seeing here, these are brick walls. These were well-built brick homes. These aren't wood homes, these are brand new brick homes. When we showed up into this east side of this town, the only lights that were visible because all the power's out, the only lights that are visible are the lights from our truck. Not to make light of this, but it was like a zombie apocalypse. The only lights that were visible are the lights from our truck. So if you needed assistance, if you were injured, where would you go? You would go to the lights. So we parked the truck, we pull out our first aid kit, we have a little trauma kit that we pull out, we set up a little triage station. Literally out of the darkness, there's people covered head to toe in mud. Some of them their clothes have been ripped off. A lot of injuries. People are crying. It's a terrifying moment. We did first aid for about an hour. Then we went out and we did search and rescue. The cameras are still in the truck. We have not pulled the cameras out because there's a human element to this that supersedes everything. We're searching door to door, pile of rubble to pile of rubble. We have little headlamps on. As you can see, every step you take is an adventure. We would go from pile of rubble to pile of rubble, and we'd be calling out, 'Hello, hello, can anybody hear me? If you can hear me, give us some kind of sign.' Then we'd wait, no response, so we move on to the next property. About two o'clock in the morning, I'm on the other side of the road. Ricky, our driver, he's over at this property. He calls out, 'Can anybody hear me?' From underneath that pile of rubble, he hears people's voices calling out to him. So we spent the next hour and a half, there was about 12 of us, and we pulled that pile of rubble off by hand until we got down to the door in the floor. I want to paint a picture here, guys. You open that door up, there's a little set of stairs goes down. The storm cellar is four feet wide by about 10 feet long. There was three families that had been trapped in there for about four and a half hours. I don't know about your confined spaces, but that is my ultimate fear right there. It's dark, you don't know if you're going to get out, you're panicking about oxygen and all these kind of things. But when we opened that door to see the people's look on their face, it was a truly remarkable moment that I would trade all the other stuff in for. But it wasn't until that stuff was finished that we started going about the work of documenting the storm.

When I started doing this, I was shooting DSLRs. One of the things that I did right from the beginning of my career is I made an investment in multiple bodies. One of the things you really don't want to do when you're in this environment is have to worry about changing lenses. So it made a lot more sense to carry multiple bodies with different lenses on them. For example, when we're in the truck, I may have a long shot that I'm shooting, so we'll have a 70-200 lens on and I'll be shooting at the 200 millimeter range. But then there's something interesting, I want to shoot a wide-angle shot, so I want a 16 millimeter or 14 millimeter lens. I will literally just take the one camera down and grab the other camera. In my six-second block, if I'm having to change a lens, it ain't working. So I used to carry around multiple DSLR cameras with bags and lenses to change out. Frankly, you were very conspicuous as a photographer. 'Wonder what that guy does? He's a photographer.' Today, when we're in that environment, I literally have an a7S camera in my pocket. That's the extent of my camera gear. A lot of times I'm using a kit lens on that camera. It's preset to its widest aperture, it's preset to super high ISO for whatever lighting environment I'm in. So I know that every shot that I get is going to be tack sharp. Maybe noisy, it'll be a little bit grainy, but it's going to be tack sharp every time. When you're walking around in these environments capturing images, telling stories, that flexibility and that ability to move around easily and to capture the stories, and frankly in a compassionate way... I do a lot of hugging. I'm a hugger. If anybody needs a hug afterwards, I'm here for you. But I'm a hugger in these environments. A lot of times people just... This was in Joplin, Missouri. 8,000 buildings were destroyed. Every landmark that was visible was gone. Shortly after I took this shot, there was a gentleman walking down just beside us here, and I actually tackled him. I tackled him because he was walking around like this and he was about to step into an open manhole because the manhole cover had been sucked off. I literally just went over and shoved him onto the grass. I said, 'Buddy, you were just about to go... Are you okay?' He says, 'I'm just looking for my street. I don't know where my street is.' Every landmark is gone, every street sign's gone. He doesn't know where his street is. Those type of things happen all the time. So I can't overstate how much, if you want to capture the story in an environment like this, being a human and being compassionate and connecting with people on a human level is the most important thing you can do. No matter where we go and see these kind of scenes, the images tend to be interchangeable. When a tornado goes through, every town looks the same afterwards. We were in Moore, Oklahoma a couple years ago, and my experience as a photographer came full circle. This gentleman here in the top right-hand corner, that's the rubble of his father's home. The tornado went through Moore, it was an EF-5. Everything was destroyed. His father survived. A few hours before we got here, they had pulled his father out of the rubble of this tornado. They had no storm shelter, no basement. But there was this big wooden captain's chair in the living room. When the tornado hit, dad crawled up under this chair. When the house came down and all the debris, he had a few bumps and bruises, but essentially he survived. He survived one of the strongest tornadoes ever recorded. So when I'm talking to this gentleman whose dad survived, I had him sitting here, I was sitting over here, my cameraman was over my shoulder. We were having a very matter-of-fact interview. 'Here's the details, here's the statistics, here's what was happening, and here's what we did.' It was all very matter-of-fact. Then out the corner of my eye, there was a woman standing over here, and I could tell she wanted to interrupt this very badly. So I allowed her to step in. I said, 'You guys want to talk?' She walked up to him and she had in her hand a handful of photos. Some of them were ripped and torn and wet and damaged, some of them were in decent shape. She handed them to him and said, 'I believe these are your dad's.' In that moment, I'm getting goosebumps just saying it. He of course teared up at that point, and it was an emotional moment for all of us. But he's standing in this rubble. Does anybody in the room think that he was checking to find out if the microwave made it? Was he concerned about the microwave or the big-screen TV that they got? Or, 'Man, I hope the bed frame, hopefully I salvaged the bed frame.' What was he looking for? He was looking for the memories. He was looking for the photos. That's exactly right. He was looking for the photos. During the course of that day, we spent the whole day there. I come from a farming community, and farmers are notorious for this. Here's what people would do as we were wandering around interviewing people, taking our pictures. They were doing a farmer thing. Farmers do this. 'How big was the hail at your house? We got nickel-sized hail.' 'That ain't nothing, we had quarters.' 'That ain't nothing, we had golf ball-sized hail.' We would be interviewing somebody and that's what their house looked like, and a guy would come up and go, 'You gotta come and take pictures over here. That ain't nothing. See what happened at our house.' The reality is people want to have their stories told. They're happy to share them, but they're only happy to do that if they feel comfortable and there's a human connection. So we take that part of what we do very, very seriously.

I'm super thrilled to be able to make my living doing something I love. I think that's all of our goals in life and our dreams, to do something we love. I get to do that, and I get to see some pretty amazing things. I get to travel to different parts of the world and throughout North America. I get to experience things that literally there's a handful in my fraternity that get to experience the same thing. I wish that I could share with more than just photos with everyone because it truly is an amazing experience. Again, for the people in the room that are interested in the technology, I did a series of aurora shots this year with this camera. These were at 12,800 ISO, shot with JPEG with no processing. Just to give you a sense of the image quality and where it's going. It used to be that camera technology was improving on megapixels. Once they got past 12, everyone went, 'Okay, we don't care anymore.' Now it's all about ISO. That's where it's going. I am amazed constantly at what 12,800 ISO can look like on these cameras. But I'm going to leave you with this shot and just again say that my goal is to tell some stories, capture images. I don't worry about the tech talk. If you walked into a Vistek and you were buying a camera for the first time, what advice would I give somebody in that position? My advice would be this: you can walk around an event like this, you can read a lot of articles, and you can hear a lot of things that will overwhelm you and make you feel like if you're not doing something a certain way, you're doing it wrong. That's just not the case. The best camera in the world, as they say, is the camera that's in your hand, because that's when you've got it. If it's an iPhone, use your iPhone. But for me, it's the moments that are important, not so much the tech. So thank you so much for listening to me ramble. I will stick around if anybody has any questions at all. We have time for a few questions. Perfect. If anybody's got any questions, throw them at me. Well, great, that's perfect then. But anyway, I'll be sticking around. If you've got questions here, I'll stick around and I can chat for a few minutes. So don't forget, Sunday nights, 9 PM, CMT, 'Tornado Hunters', hottest new show on Canadian television. That's what I've been told. I'm just relaying the message. So thank you so much.