Nature Science

NEW IMAGES OF PRIMORDIAL SPARKS

Lightning in Nebraska by Jason Weingart.

Photo: by Jason Weingart. Lightning explodes from a supernal in Nebraska

While we are focused on upcoming July 4th sparks setting off a frenzy of celebrations of independence, we are also totally into the natural fireworks sparking across the sky. Nothing beats lightning for jaw-dropping sparkified beauty.

We’ve curated some powerful storm sparks images that are bound to blow you away.

JASON WEINGART

Photographer Jason Weingart has been obsessed with weather drama since he was a kid.

"There is nothing in the world quite like storm chasing,” he says. “99 percent of the time is sheer boredom; looking at weather models and forecast products, driving to the target, sitting around and waiting for storms to fire.”

But Weingart is in it for that one percent of the time. “When you are standing next to a perfectly structured supercell or a severe thunderstorm pumping out billions of volts of electricity, makes it all worthwhile.”

Weingart photographed his first lightning photo in August of 2009 and was instantly hooked. He began studying meteorology, and he chased storms every chance he got.

“Weather became my passion, my calling, my life,” he says.

Weingart has won numerous awards for his spectacular spark filled masterpieces, including first place in the 2012 NASA Extreme Weather Photos competition.

CRAIG ECCLES

Australian photographer Craig Eccles is all about sparks that zap into bolts. He sometimes travels up to 300 miles in anticipation of a major storm to satisfy his fix.

Eccles teaches photography in Perth. He loves the rush, the serendipity and the moment that trips the trigger in a pitch black sky and flashes in a split second to make it seem like daytime.

ROLF MAEDER

A professional French horn player and choir director from Switzerland, named Rolf Maeder, became enchanted with Sedona, Arizona. He was so inspired by the powerful beauty of this jagged land, with its monumental red rocks sculpted against a big open bright cobalt sky; he began taking photographs.

Sedona’s desert canyons bake with high heat and summer storms rock out with a magnificent beat. Maeder treats his photos as if they were musical compositions, considering rhythm, color, harmony and framework.

Photography has been a catalyst for Maeder, serving as a doorway into new ways of seeing.

“It is often the ordinary that touches me more than the extraordinary; the things that no one takes the time to look at are often full of surprises, joyful discoveries that, in their subtlety, have the power to reach deep into our hearts,” says Maeder. “ Photographing nature has taught me that there truly is no ordinary.”

Fine art prints are available at Maeder’s website.

ROBERT ARN

Robert Arn loves to look up and capture sparks. He is an amateur astronomer with a passion for photography.

Arn is also a graduate student and teacher at Colorado State University, working on his Ph.D in Mathematics. He dabbles in computer vision, signal processing, and large-scale data analysis. But he plays underneath the stars, “trying to capture part of this majestic universe.”

CHRIS KOTSIOPOULOS

Chris Kotsiopoulos is not focused only on lightning, his website, called Greek Sky, is more about the night time sky and its beauty in general. But his lightning photos are just absolutely incredible.

He gets these amazing effects by stacking images, getting dozens of beautiful bolts in each shot. Sometimes he’ll stack nearly 100 in order to get the perfect appearance of the thundering sky.

This image, taken at Kos Island, Greece, is Kotsiopoulos’ record for most bolts captured in one shot. And it’s not surprising, seeing them lace intricately across the sky.

From Olympic Stadium, Athens, Kotsiopoulos stacked 42 shots to capture this incredible lightning storm, which he said was the most intense he had ever seen. Some of his images were even ruined by excessive brightness from the crashing bolts.

Read more about Beautiful Sparks, as they relate to Arts/Design, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Place/Time, Mind/Body, and Soul/Impact including How to Capture Beautiful Sparks.

Enter your own images and ideas about Beautiful Sparks in this week’s creative Photo Competition. Open for entries now until 11:59 p.m. PT on 07.06.14. If you are reading this after that date, check out the current BN Creative Competition, and enter!