Back in action with a mild lightning storm

In my first photo excursion with my new old camera equipment, I went to the shore of Charleston Harbor and watched a storm move through. I used a small tripod (since my heavy-duty one remains missing), so it shook in the wind.

The storm was severe and impressive at one point. The National Weather Service issued a warning well ahead of the system. Seen above, a Coast Guard boat scrambles as dark clouds approach.

A gust front moved over the Ravenel Bridge, but the storm split apart. It remained strong to the east and west. But in the middle, where I was, hardly anything was brewing.

With dark clouds overhead, a sailing vessel makes its way toward the dock.

The boat, under power of a motor, docked near my location at the South Carolina Aquarium.

Lightning illuminated the sky, but the bolts were mainly confined to the east and west. Occasionally, one would crawl through the clouds over me, but I caught nothing impressive on camera.

I got some stuff back

Some of the camera equipment on the floor of the pawn shop.

Palmetto Pawn on Rivers Avenue in North Charleston. They buy gold! And my stolen camera equipment. (And here's an update: I must thank them for doing so!)

 Thank God for stupid criminals.

A detective called me last month and said a man had sold some of my and my employer's camera equipment to a North Charleston pawn shop.

He got a whopping $300 for nearly $10,000 worth of photographic tools.

Fortunately, the police were on the ball and monitoring inventory lists that pawn shops are required to turn over. Investigators matched up the serial numbers of my missing equipment.

I got it back; the pawn shop was out $300.

Unfortunately, some things -- some important things -- remain missing.

Among the missing items are my two most expensive lenses, a 105mm Nikkor macro I've used to shoot insects and a 150-500mm Sigma I've snapped wildlife with.

My Manfrotto tripod is still out there, too, so my nighttime lightning-chasing adventures are still on hold.

The only damage was to the shotgun mic on my Canon video camera. It was broken off, likely because the thief had never touched one in his life and had no clue how to remove it.

But I must be thankful for what I've got: real cameras. I hated having nothing.

The man (suspected of being) responsible is another story.

The suspect.

For this 24-year-old from North Charleston, it wasn't his first rodeo.

(Note: I'm omitting his name from this post on the off chance that he Googles himself. He hasn't been arrested -- yet. You can find his name in some of the following links, though.)

He has a lengthy criminal history.

He was in the news in 2008, when officials at Charleston County's jail accidentally released him. He was facing burglary, weapons and drug charges at the time of that snafu.

He again made headlines last fall, when he bailed from a stolen SUV and ran from the police. In the stolen vehicle, officers found a toddler holding a pellet pistol and saying "gun, gun."

His most recent conviction was in 2010, for burglary. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison. All 10, of course, were suspended, and he was given three years of probation in lieu of hard time.

So, when someone broke into my vehicle, he was on probation for burglary. Go figure.

Last I checked, detectives in North Charleston likely will arrest him on a charge of selling stolen property. The burglary occurred in the separate city of Charleston, where a detective was less certain about charging him.

A chance still exists that he has my other stuff or that it'll show up elsewhere, but I won't get my hopes up.

Though if any of the stupidity he has exhibited in the past is an indicator, it's not entirely out of the question.

Update since I wrote this: He was arrested in late June in Berkeley County on unrelated burglary and larceny charges, then released from jail on bail.

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.