13 supercell thunderstorms like you've never seen them before

Most people try to avoid thunderstorms. Photographer Mike Hollingshead does the opposite. Well-known for his incredible still photography, his latest work features an extra whirl in the stormy tail (quite literally).

Storm photography is not easy. Reward is scant and storm chasers often drive hundreds of kilometres only to arrive at a destination to find fantastically benign weather. Photographer Mike Hollingshead reportedly follows about 40 storms each year, clocking up in excess of 30 000 kilometres to shoot, edit and produce surreal images of supercells and tornadoes. His latest project takes the editing a bit further: setting the storms in motion. The below animations aren’t created like traditional gifs, in which moving elements from a video are isolated and looped. Instead, the below (and above) gifs are created from a static image and manipulated in Photoshop to create the animation from thin air.

Below are a few examples of some of Mike’s ‘regular’ time-lapse storm photography: