Edge of Stability: Jeff Boyce’s 70,000-Photo Storm and Night-Sky Time-Lapse

In May and June 2015 California police officer Jeff Boyce took five weeks off work, loaded his truck with cameras and went looking for the sky at its wildest. He drove through 15 US states and into Canada, shot about 70,000 photographs and turned them into Edge of Stability, a five-minute time-lapse of supercell storms, lightning, the Milky Way, the northern lights and the birth of a tornado.

Edge of Stability: the trip behind the film

“I set out in my truck with no particular destination in mind,” Boyce told KSL News. His plan was to follow the weather. He read the Storm Prediction Center’s outlooks and tracked experienced storm chasers and meteorologists on Twitter, then drove wherever the forecasts pointed, sometimes more than 600 miles in a day. By the end he had covered about 20,000 miles.

The route took in California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Minnesota. In Utah he stopped at Green River, Moab and Goosenecks State Park, although only Goosenecks made the final cut. On a whim he crossed into Manitoba to photograph the northern lights, a detour that got him detained and searched by Canadian immigration for a couple of hours. In his words, the aurora made even that “worth it”.

Time-lapse by the numbers

• Photos: about 70,000, at a pace of roughly 8,000 a day when the sky cooperated.
• Used in the film: about 30% of them; another 20% was still waiting to be processed when the film came out.
• Distance: about 20,000 miles in five weeks.
• Cameras: two Canon 6D bodies.
• Lenses: Rokinon 14mm f/2.8, Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 and Tamron 24–70mm f/2.8.

Boyce works under the name Negative Tilt, and he credited the time-lapse films of Nicolaus Wegner as his inspiration. The film was published on Vimeo in July 2015 and quickly picked up by PetaPixel, KSL and CBS News.

Supercells, lightning and the birth of a tornado

The trip ran through the peak of the Great Plains storm season. In late spring warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico meets dry air from the west and cold air from the north, and the clash creates the instability that gives the film its name: when warm air near the ground is lighter than the air above it, it rises violently, building towering thunderstorms. With strong wind shear the whole updraft can begin to rotate, and those rotating storms, supercells, produce the giant layered “mothership” clouds, large hail and most strong tornadoes.

Time-lapse shows what the eye misses in real time. Clouds that seem to drift become churning structures, rotation becomes obvious, and a storm that takes an hour to mature unfolds in seconds. Boyce’s highlight was a tornado forming from an almost clear sky.

Night skies and northern lights

Between storms, Boyce turned his cameras upward. Wide, fast lenses such as his 14mm f/2.8 and 24mm f/1.4 gather enough starlight for long sequences of the Milky Way wheeling over the Southwest’s dark deserts and canyons. The aurora in Manitoba completed the set: the shifting curtains of green light produced when charged particles from the Sun strike oxygen and nitrogen high in the atmosphere.

Respect the storms: experienced chasers keep an escape route open, stay out of a storm’s hail core and never drive into flooded roads. For more severe-weather films, watch Mike Olbinski’s Monsoon II and the April 2015 Illinois tornado footage, or read about Mount Washington’s extreme-weather observations.

Related reading

• Vincent Brady’s Toroidal Sky: A Four-Camera Night-Sky Experiment
• Thierry Cohen’s Darkened Cities: Imagining Urban Skies Without Light Pollution
• Sun Halos over Finland: Understanding Pauli Hänninen’s Photographs
• Ben Coffman on Photographing the Milky Way and the Landscapes Beneath It
• The Mountain: Seven Days of Sky Photography at Teide
• Mike Taylor’s Maine Aurora Photography and a Change of Direction

Sources