Storm chasing

Photographer Rob Darby on his travels through the Midwest on the lookout for storms:

As an artist, Darby has turned time and again to the US Midwest, including the landscapes of Kansas. “Kansas is known for cornfields, farming, and, fortunately for me and other people who enjoy storms and storm chasing, large and sometimes violent thunderstorms call ‘supercells,’” he explains. “Kansas is uniquely positioned in a location where the ingredients needed to form supercells and tornados are found.

“Warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico streams northward and meets dry air from the desert southwest, along with cool air that drops into the area from the Pacific Ocean. These ingredients, when combined with rotation in the atmosphere, create the conditions required for the most violent storms.” He’s most likely to encounter a severe thunderstorm from April through June, but they can happen year-round.

While Darby admits that storm-chasing can be dangerous, he also makes safety his top priority. “Imagine driving down a country road, barely wide enough for one car, at 60 miles per hour, attempting to keep up with a storm that is moving as fast as you are,” he says. “Storm chasers and those of us who like to photograph the storms carry equipment that allows us to know the direction and speed of a storm, the possible conditions that are underneath it, and good navigation equipment so that we always have a way to get away from the storm should it become necessary.”

Darby describes his earlier work as “portraits of storms,” but his approach has shifted over time. “Unconsciously, perhaps, I found myself evolving to incorporate elements of the human landscapes into the images,” he tells us. “So, while my early work focused mostly on storm structure, now I find that I instinctively include elements of humanity in them: a decaying grain silo, a homestead, a small town, or even the juxtaposition of modern technology (a wind farm, for example) to provide more context to the scene.”