It took photographer Mike Oblinski four years of traveling to Plains States to capture this fantastic time lapse footage of a supercell thunderstorm near Booker, Texas.
Supercells are a type of thunderstorm, specifically the type that contains a rotating mass of rising air called a mesocyclone. These are the storms that form tornadoes (although Oblinski says this one did not). Watching the video, I just kept thinking about the title of that Flannery O'Connor story: Everything that rises must converge.
The timelapse was shot on a Canon 5D Mark II with a Rokinon 14mm 2.8 lens. It's broken up into four parts. One thing to note early on in the first part is the way the rain is coming down on the right and actually being sucked back into the rotation. Amazing.
A few miles south is where part two picks up. And I didn't realize how fast it was moving south, so part three is just me panning the camera to the left. During that third part you can see dust along the cornfield being pulled into the storm as well…part of the strong inflow.
The final part is when the storm had started dying out and we shot lightning as it passed over us.
