Going without

It figures that Charleston would get a nice rainstorm/weakened thunderstorm within the first week of the vehicle burglary that left me without the cameras and lenses I've worked so hard to collect. Instead, I used my iPhone. Above, a shot of the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge in front of the storm's "whale's mouth."

This was shot from the rooftop of The Post and Courier as the storm approached. It was part of a line that produced some tornado warnings in Orangeburg County, which is north of the Charleston area. By the time it reached the coastline, it had significantly weakened, though.

 

I got out of work and went to the Ravenel Bridge, which is where I run several times a week. I grabbed my work-issued iPhone, which has a waterproof case, and started running up.

I looked toward the ocean and saw a core of rainfall off to the southeast. A cargo ship on the horizon was preparing to head into it.

I reached the top of the bridge just as I started feeling a few drops. Rain began enveloping me as the storm clouds came in from the north, the west and the south. I got soaked. It was kind of cool. But I still miss my cameras.

All gone

One of the officers wrote some observations on a notepad.

The broken glass made a mess. And my things had been ransacked.

I stepped outside my Charleston apartment Friday, ready for a final day of work before the weekend. As usual, I was tired, and it was a warm morning. The humidity took my breath away.

I pressed a button on a remote to unlock my car doors, then I turned the corner around the rear of my vehicle.

Shards of tinted glass had accumulated on the ground. They sparkled in the sunlight.

I looked up. The back window on the driver's side wasn't where it should have been. Bits of jagged glass jutted from the frame. Two large scratches revealed the metal underneath the coat of black paint on my Ford.

Some "criminals in the night," as my favorite 5-year-old girl would later say, had violated my space.

This took my breath away, too.

I dropped the coffee mug from my hand, my bag of gym clothes, my laptop bag.

Frantic, I looked inside. The window had been shattered. Glass was everywhere. On the raincoat on the back seat. Inside the door the window once was attached to. Under the cushion. On the booster seat my girlfriend's daughter uses.

A cover over the back cargo area of my SUV had been removed. Underneath it, everything of value was gone.

A backpack full of tools. My Mag flashlights. A Harley-Davidson kit for my former motorcycle. All of my camera equipment and my employer-issued photographic tools.

In total, eight lenses, three cameras and two flashes were taken. My Manfrotto tripod wasn't there either. A professional camera/laptop bag, too. Other accessories, such as an automatic trigger used to take still images to make time-lapse videos, had been stolen as well.

Even my business cards. I hope no one is posing as Andrew Knapp, reporter.

Missing were all the things I worked for years to buy in support of a hobby that gave me happiness and a sense of accomplishment. The monetary value exceeded $10,000, but it meant more to me.

I telephoned the area's finest.

Three police officers from the Charleston Police Department showed up. One remarked that the scene seemed odd. Whoever broke in must have either known me or the things I had in my car, he said. Possibly, it's someone from my own apartment complex. No other vehicles in the parking lot had been broken into. Mine was the sole target.

The burglar must have had a car parked nearby or retreated into a nearby apartment. The amount of equipment taken would have been difficult for a single person to carry.

Another officer asked me if I were trying to defraud my insurance company, wondering if I had burglarized my own vehicle so I could file an insurance claim and sell my old equipment.

"What insurance?" I have none. Thanks, Officer, for taking this grand theft seriously!

A detective later took a complete list of the items I lost.

They thought the burglar had smashed the window and crawled through. The molding around the window frame was scuffed and astray. That's consistent with someone's body sliding and rolling over it.

They suggested that I buy a lock box from a police-surplus store and bolt it down. I could keep my valuables inside.

"What valuables?" They're all gone.

Admittedly, it was stupid of me to leave the stuff in my car. I shouldn't have trusted my own neighbors.

But it has happened to other photographers from the newspaper. Co-workers felt my pain and agreed it's a lot of equipment to lug in and out of the house every day.

And it's not my fault. The things were concealed inside a vehicle -- my vehicle, which was locked. Saying it's my fault is like blaming a woman for being raped; just because it's there doesn't mean you can have it.

If only I had caught the miscreants, they would have regretted breaking the law. You enter my domain, you pay the price.

But now, it's my price to pay, and my livelihood has taken a hit.

I still have an iPhone -- well, two iPhones, actually -- that I can take photos with. I still have my very first camera: a Pentax K1000, with which I snapped the best lightning photos of my life -- on film, of course.

But I don't have the capability to take the shots I have in recent years: of eagles snatching ducks, of bees lighting on flowers, of meteors piercing Earth's atmosphere.

After I moved to South Carolina, I finally was happy with the amount of photographic equipment I had. My previous employer never issued an SLR camera to me, though it expected me to somehow take pictures. My new employer provided me with professional-grade equipment.

And now it's gone. All gone.

And as if the morning weren't bad enough, I later learned that my father, the best photographer I know, was being hospitalized about the same time I discovered the break-in. He had suffered a heart attack.

But things could be worse.

If a burglar had stolen the many hard drives containing the photos I had taken with those cameras, I would be devastated. The cameras can be replaced; the images I've made with them cannot.

And my father weathered the episode relatively well.

It just shows that I can't take anything for granted. My safety, or my parents.

A soon-to-be tornado and other meteorological disappointments

We start this post with a chase that began way behind schedule. I had just arrived home when I realized a storm had popped up and was moving into the area I had just been. I grabbed my stuff -- or so I thought -- and left. I saw a nice gust front move northeastward as I raced to get in front of it along Interstate 526, an intended beltway that partially encircles Charleston. I took this shot by sticking my camera out my window at 70 mph and snapping away. Just happened to catch a bolt.

I continued to play catchup and took this shot while I was at a stoplight. Some spectacular lightning was coming from these clouds, backdropped by a golden sunset.

Another shot of the severe thunderstorm as I drove along North Rhett Avenue in North Charleston.

I decided that a shipping facility with heavy equipment was the best place to pull over and take some shots of the storm before it blew over me.

The clouds were ragged and interesting when lit by the setting sun, but lightning wasn't frequent at this point, unfortunately.

The sun began to shine through the light rainfall on the south side of the thunderstorm.

I passed Hanahan, where I tried to snap a few pics of lightning striking an airplane, then drove here, to Goose Creek. These low clouds seem consistent with a wall cloud, which is often a precursor to a tornado. Indeed, about 10 minutes later, a tornado warning was issued on this portion of the thunderstorm. A funnel cloud was spotted and filmed in the Francis Marion National Forest, well to the northeast of this location. Unfortunately, I had to snap this with a wide-angle lens because I had forgotten a memory card for my Nikon, to which my telephoto was affixed.

On an earlier day, I was in a community on Johns Island, reporting about a homicide that disrupted sleeping neighbors. En route back to the office, I saw sheriff's vehicles speeding to an unknown location. I followed them to this marina, where a man had been reported missing and was thought to have drowned. He lived on a boat here. I was distracted by far-off clouds that were part of a severe thunderstorm well to the north of the St. Johns Yacht Club.

This was a rather large anvil cloud, and I could hear thunder in the distance. No lightning was apparent.

This was the faraway storm, which was pretty much stationary over Summerville, which is about 30 minutes north of Charleston. I took this shot from the roof of The Post and Courier building just before the storm fizzled out.

On yet another day, I was driving home form West Virginia, where I visited my beautiful girlfriend, when I encountered some thunderstorms. Above is a shot of a few mammatus clouds that I snapped after briefly exiting Interstate 26 just south of Columbia, S.C.

I sort of liked this thin cloud on the opposite side of the sky from the thunderstorm. It was nearly sunset.

I tried taking photos of some spectacular lightning that I witnessed as I drove over the interstate. But all I got was some purple sky.

On another day near Ravenel, a small community west of Charleston, I tried photographing some interesting cloud cover associated with a storm that was, again, well off to the north. I was expecting the storm to move into the area, but it died instead. This is a shot of a "Jacob's ladder" as sunshine pierced the blanket of clouds.

I went out for a run one day and parked my vehicle outside the area Home Depot. That's my starting point for a little route I do. And I happened to take a liking to the clouds, the sun behind them, the shadow they were casting and the jet streaking through all the crepuscular-ray goodness.

Lightning on the Battery during night of tiny 'supermoon'

Can I just say that the so-called "supermoon" sucked? For some reason, it was hyped by the media, even though it was only 0.8 percent larger than last April's full moon and so much smaller than 2011's biggest (see my post from last year), when the moon was 248 miles closer to Earth than it was Saturday night. Had I done more research on it instead of blindly believing the headlines, I probably wouldn't have photographed this scene on the Battery last night. The shot overlooks Charleston Harbor with sailboats and Fort Sumter on the horizon.

A closeup after the moon emerged from a thick cloud bank on the eastern horizon. The clouds were a hindrance to viewing the moon at its largest, just as it rises. Earth's atmosphere, of course, magnifies the moon at that point.

Later on in the evening, some more clouds moved in, and we had a little lightning. I caught the very end of the show, long after it had moved far out to sea.

This looks across Charleston Harbor as lightning strikes in the Atlantic Ocean off Sullivan's Island.

I missed you, clouds

On one afternoon of thunderstorm warnings, I was out for my daily jog when the remnants of one system blew through. The storm had dissipated when it reached downtown Charleston, but these mammatus clouds were a nice treat. I took this shot next to some old smokestacks along East Bay Street.

South Carolina isn't Central Florida when it comes to active weather, but it's still the hot South, so thunderstorms do happen. A few weeks ago, we had a couple of days of atmospheric convection, which really kicked off the hot and stormy season.

These are some shots I got over the past several weeks.

I took several photos with my iPhone as I jogged over the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge, which connects Charleston with the town of Mount Pleasant. The sun was filtering nicely through the clouds.

A large anvil cloud was associated with the storm that eventually died. This is the northern edge of it as I entered the final stretch of my run.

This was a long-lasting rainbow in Charleston - the other Charleston, in West Virginia - on St. Patrick's Day.

No, I did not find the gold.

On another day, I was waiting around for a line of thunderstorms to make its way to the Charleston area. About the time I snapped this shot of the distant clouds, a severe thunderstorm warning was issued.


I was traveling in the wrong direction when a tornado warning was declared in a different storm to the west. I turned around and took this shot with my iPhone as I tried to reach the tornado-warned system.


I saw the towering cumulonimbus cloud in the distance as I sped toward the storm.

I tried to no avail to find something interesting in this mess of cloud cover.

I looked all around at the clouds off U.S. 17 but couldn't really see anything interesting.

These clouds were turbulent and being whipped around by high winds. But I saw nothing that remotely resembled circulation.

On yet another evening, I left for a quick trip to the store without taking my camera. I knew, just knew when I left that I would end up regretting it. Sure enough, when I stepped out of Walmart, a large rainbow was arcing over this marsh, with these pink clouds in the background. It would've been a perfect shot. When I finally got home and grabbed my camera, it was gone.

On this day, the National Weather Service issued some severe thunderstorm warnings to the west and north of Charleston. As I caught a glimpse of this in the distance, I thought it was going to be something good.

Alas, it was just a line of dark clouds with nothing exciting following it.

On yet another day, more recently, I saw some pileus clouds atop some distant showers. Seemed liked a promising sign of storminess to come.

I then drove out west of Charleston and looked over the marshland along U.S. 17 while waiting for a line of thunderstorms to roll into the area.

I caught a few lightning bolts in the distance, but I had just removed my lens to switched it out when lightning struck directly nearby and directly in front of me. And of course, I missed it.

This system actually got better organized as it moved over me. A shelf cloud began forming overhead.

I followed the storm eastward to the Ravenel Bridge, under which I took shelter and tried to snap a few shots. Nothing special.