Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2014, as a news-style piece. “His latest work” (the Nebraska hailstorm) and his career details refer to that date.
If there is a storm, there is a good chance that Mike Hollingshead is stalking it, capturing the natural beauty of something that is about to destroy a town or city.
Mike is considered the best in his profession as a “storm chaser”. He is a photographer who specialises in capturing this kind of event and who has turned photography into a highly profitable business, even though his photos circulate around the internet without anyone even crediting him as the author.
His work has appeared in practically every outlet, including the cover of National Geographic, and his fame has landed him in some films, as well as at the end of the TV series Dexter. His blog, Extremeinstability.com, collects countless storms, tornadoes and natural phenomena of spectacular visual beauty.
Mike began chasing storms part-time in 1999, purely out of passion and for fun, but in 2004 he started doing it full-time, turning this hobby into his way of life, his job and his business. These are some of the impressive pieces of work by this professional photographer, all of which can be seen on his blog:
- A supercell photographed at a service area in Nebraska after a whole day of chasing storms.
- A kind of storm that often grabs attention on social media because people mistake it for an alien mothership. But no, luckily it is just a storm forming a tornado that will flatten everything in its path.
- A shower of lightning like very few people ever get to see. Mike says he took the photos from inside his car to avoid being hit by one of the bolts.
- His latest work, in which he photographed what Nebraska looked like after a tremendous hailstorm that wrecked cars and houses.
As we can see, he is a true professional who also shows us how a hobby can sometimes become our way of life.
Further reading
Featured image: Hanyou23, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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