9 miles round trip was all it took to secure my best lightning photos of 2026!  And the one above EASILY the best of the bunch, maybe the best I’ve shot in the last couple years!  Holy cow, what an evening!  I posted all the shots on my chase log; go check them out!

As mentioned earlier this week, I did some backend work on the site and have launched the Tropical Weather and Celestial Event sections!  The content of the logs is not populated yet, but I have finally got the landing pages for those sections coded out and posted.  Wildfires and Winter will be coming up the pipe in the coming days, which should round out all the remaining sections.  Obviously populating a lot of these will be the biggest project, but now those logs have places to live. Excited to finally expand the site with these new sections!  Looking forward to…

There are 19 days between August 12 and August 30, and I chased 11 of them.  Three were road travel days, and I flew to Houston on the 30th… 15 of 19 days I was on the road/in the sky… if you factor Edouard and flying home yesterday, that would be 17 of the last 21 days… that’s a lot… So yes, forgive me when I say FINALLY in terms of a quiet stretch… I hadn’t really had any idea I had gone that hard in the last few weeks until I felt it yesterday.  Edouard wasn’t the most exhausting…

Trust me when I say that I wasn’t really have THAT much fun standing in the western eyewall of Edouard near Port Arthur, Texas to start off September; I was attempting to recorded a selfie-style video, but the wind and rain was so overwhelming, I just laughed at the camera.  Made for a great still!  Haha But yes, got back from a one-and-done intercept of Edouard; a small, but mighty storm… got blasted pretty good in the western eyewall, and spent a good chunk of time doing the thing in there, and was back home the following day.  While more…

https://tonylaubach.net/weather-journals/ This is exciting!  In conjunction with a social media series I am putting together for September, I finally created a space here on my site to include some early-era (pre-chase) weather journals, which cover many events in the mid/late 90s prior to my chase documentation.  This includes a few Ohio-based weather events I experienced and documented in some form, plus my high-school era lightning photography when I moved to Colorado in 1998.  For years, most of this stuff has been scattered about on various pieces of hardware in various forms of archives, many scans of old photos with no…

The last two weeks have provided plenty in the eye-candy department, from awesome lightning to great structure to awesome sunsets, and while yesterday’s chase provided plenty of a lot of that, what it did differently this time was actually be severe.  Yes, I have seen severe storms scattered over the last couple weeks, but its been rare to actually experience one.  Yesterday will wrap up this lengthy stint with a memorable bow echo intercept along I-80 as I rode out 60-70mph winds in Maxwell after being overtaken by a pretty dramatic looking shelf cloud. Wrapped up in North Platte shooting…