A brief bio on me just to make things more personal since you took the time to view the site.





G'day!  

Some info about me so you may relate to where I'm coming from and why I chase.

I'm 48 and have a lovely wife, Nathalie and my daughter who turns 18 this year (and going on 30). They're a patient lot with me during the storm season and my wife sees to it that I do all the house 'stuff' during the dry, but when the storm season comes around it's 'my time' and I'm not at home a whole lot as you would expect! Any hint of a rumble of thunder and I'm out the door.

After work it's usually a change of clothes or not, grab a drink and head straight out again or driving from work at those terrible early morning hours, yet still chasing the lightning if I know it's heading closer.

 

 

I work night shift so it's sometimes even hard for me to get out during the peak storm periods to chase.  I end up chasing for an hour around town during work's tea break and then after midnight. 

At least I have all day to chase if I like and that's a bonus if the storm fronts are photogenic. I get two days off per week free but as luck usually has it no storms come on those days and end up coming during working at night! 

Thankfully I done enough miles to know where to go and what to expect when observing storms around Darwin and it has been very rewarding in the last 2 years

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My interest was sparked by Cyclone Tracy in 1974 when I was coming back to Adelaide from Melbourne (an eight hour drive) with some fellow who had driven all the way down, after severe tropical cyclone Tracy destroyed Darwin, in his Pontiac Firebird with Coke cans holding up the windscreen and the car was just dented all over from debris of the cyclone. It was a family of five, plus mum and the driver all coming back to Adelaide in this car. 

The looks that people gave us were priceless to say the least!!


My first ever intro to storm photography was Peter Jarver's  book The Top End of Downunder.  It was his images that lit the fire to start chasing lightning and storms.  Peter himself was an avid chaser and his photos are legendary.

 
From that day on I realized I was missing out on something special.  So years later when my family and I moved to Darwin I decided to take a more active interest in severe weather.  Since 2002 I decided to get serious and read - and still do - websites, articles, books, reports on severe weather both here in Australia and in the USA.  Just to find out a little more about what I was actually chasing!


I purchased an SLR camera and all the gear and storm chased initially just to get some photos, but two years on have come to appreciate the complexity of these things and just how important they are to the planet!  They're so complex in the way they form that chasing them now is even more exciting than before.  I generally move around the Darwin area and further rural about a 170km radius or even as far as 500km if the likelihood of big storms is forecast.

I've been fortunate because of my passion and knack for locating storms and lightning that I won the Tourism NT  national photographic competition in 2007 which was a great honor.  My photos are regularly featured in the Northern Territory News and Sunday Territorian.

 

 

November 2009 I filmed with an Austrian film crew for National Geographic for a new lightning documentary to be aired late 2010-11.  In November 2007 I was contacted by a French correspondent and had a 7 page feature done on myself chasing storms in Darwin for the European GEO Magazine, which is the sister magazine to National Geographic.  GEO sent a photographer who is a storm chaser on behalf of the magazine to Darwin for a couple of weeks to chase with me and also do some serious chasing himself. A wonderfully humbling experience to see that your hard work is noticed overseas by such respected magazines.