Storm Driven

The day started with a nice quiet morning drinking caffeine free coffee watching the sun shining from the east and clouds coming in from the west. Soon the quietness ended with hearing shots being fired. Positive they were not fireworks, I grabbed the scanner to gain some insight into what was going on. All I know as of now is that the shooter was caught, someone called TPD about being shot at, K-9 searched for a woman that ran from a car, the Tulsa County Sheriffs were handling the call with TPD help and they also had a meth lab at the same location.

Maybe the local media will cover it?

During the above events the rain moved in and stayed most of the day, which I knew could hamper the idea of getting strong enough storms to provide the lightning I was wanting during the fireworks, oh well good for the thousands of others who would rather not have any lightning. As the evening drew near I saw the storms struggling to build to the north of Tulsa as I headed towards downtown to find a different location to capture the fireworks and the downtown buildings. As soon as I got to the spot and started unloading I heard on the scanner that the fireworks would start early. After a quick setup I was good to go.

we got about halfway into the fireworks show and then it just stopped.

Shortly after the quietness I heard someone over the radio say that one of the trailers blew up. After 10 to 15 minutes and a few mentions of go and no go, it was officially cancelled. With the lightning making it’s way closer I decided to try and catch a lightning shot with some of the many personal displays going off to the north of me.

That didn’t really work out as good as I had wished. Next was to try and get more lightning shots over the downtown buildings.

That didn’t work out either but I did manage to get some on the camcorder at least. Next move was to follow the lightning to east Tulsa and try to get a strike on one of the towers out there.

That didn’t work out either so it was time to call it a night. While working on the pictures and this I’ve been listening to TPD officers having problems(burning eyes and throats) while blocking streets for a hazardous material fire at Envirosolve on S.W. Blvd. It’s odd how TFD doesn’t pass along information to TPD so officers know whats happening for sure instead of worrying about what danger they might actually be in. Good night

Fireworks almost rate up there with the excitement of shooting lightning. In the past 2 years lightning has been visible on the 3rd or the 4th and this year might give it on both nights. Hopefully though the lightning will manage to be in the background unlike how the past 2 years didn’t work out right.
Here is a slideshow of the fireworks from the last 3 years around Tulsa on various dates.

From a “storm stories” episode on the weather channel featuring Lanny Dean and his night 2 years ago tonight and the Greensburg, Kansas tornado. I’m holding the flashlight as we took turns cutting the power lines with a hacksaw.

Deciding I didn’t want to go home after work and find myself watching someone elses video, of a great storm. I decided to head west shortly after 4pm. I was going to sit south of Enid but I ended up in Hennessey due to needing a bathroom and food. It short of paid of as I finally got to see not one but both TIV’s, which I have missed every year since Sean started out in it. The Bald Eagle was when I was crossing over Keystone Lake and the bumper sticker was on a Payne County Sheriff SUV in Stillwater.

Maybe better luck next trip, tomorrow?

Since I started working on streaming video, I’ve been wanting to stream with my old Sony trv128 camcorder at night. Not having an s-video or a composite plugin on my laptop prevented that until now. The solution was a EasyCap USB video capture adapter for only $15.95 found here at Amazon . I was skeptical of it from the reviews but still chose it over the higher priced adapters listed. 3 days after ordering it I had it hooked up and working in a couple of minutes. There was no problem hooking it up with Vista and works perfectly with the Adobe Flash media Encoder .  Save some bucks and go cheap with this adapter.

Soon I’ll be taking the next leap into the HD evolution with a new camcorder.

 The Canon Vixia HF S100 has drawn me into making the jump of a better quality video.. I had been looking at the Vixia HG21 but the S100 has a larger sensor of 1/2.6 and   approx 8.59 megapixels on top of 24mbps recording.  Noise in low-light will still be an issue but not worth giving up on HD completly. Some good test video can be found on youtube  of this camera but my favorite site for examples is at Digital Chumps like this one for low-light