This fairly stout tornado barely was visible as it churned northward across the flat farmland southwest through northwest of Frederick. I had seen this supercell’s first tornado, a brief cone also to the west of US-183, while driving; it had disappeared as soon as I found a safe place to pull over. Determined not to let this better-organized vortex escape the camera, but unsurprisingly bedeviled by lack of beneficially illuminating lightning out on the far part of a long, mature supercell hook, I had to pull out all the stops—f-stops, that is—and still barely got it. Since I shoot all manual, each step was deliberate: crank the aperture wide (f3.5), blast the ISO high (3200), haul the shutter speed out long (1 second, a lot higher than I’d prefer for something as quickly evolutionary as a tornado!). That drank in not only the final, dimmest vestiges of twilight west of the storm, but the reddish, still largely sodium-vapor town lights of Frederick to the north (right, off-screen), which illuminated some storm structure around the mesocyclone from the east. It also revealed headlights from oncoming traffic to my south, reflected off the road and adjoining vegetation.
2 SSW Frederick OK (12 Oct 21) Looking NW
34.3639, -99.0282