After one hour the storm has passed. Occasionally I turn left in thought, looking out of my large window which is providing me with a clear view of the Bay of ShenZhen and an island opposite that belongs to HongKong. Over HongKong the clouds tear apart.
I continue to work, having to concentrate very much, because I have to present twisted analysis results both correctly and understandably to laymen. Suddenly I notice in the left corner of my eye that something has changed. I turn to the left:
There I am looking at a tornado tube! Right at the edge of the black cloud that is hovering over my apartment and ShenZhen, there, where the sky has cleared up over HongKong, off-coast an uninhabited streak of land, there is a small tornado!
At once I rush into the next room where I keep my camera, out to the balcony and aim the lens, thinking this will be over quickly, quickly take some pictures!
But no, the show has just begun! One tornado tube after another comes and goes, sometimes two or three tubes are visible at the same time, to the right a new one is developing, in the middle another tube is in action, left, a hose passes away. Overall, I count six such vortices of, I guess, up to thirty metres in diameter. They move very slowly. We would refer to them as “landspouts” or “waterspouts”; water is dispersed on the surface of the sea and sucked -upwards; you do not want to be in the middle.
Most ships and boats keep a respectful distance. But one boat is approaching the last and strongest tornado tube, that is, the tornado has turned toward the boat. It circles around the hose on the opposite side and is finally seen again – unharmed.
The whole event lasts for twenty minutes, I have taken 83 photos.
While I continue to work, I download the photos to another laptop which I usually use to edit photos, because this is time consuming and extremely memory-intensive. This way, meanwhile, I can work on my actual laptop. After I saved the images and converted them from the raw data into the “digital negative”, it comes to my mind that not that many people will have seen this, and not everyone who saw it will have had a professional camera with a 400 mm-telephoto lens at his disposal! (The tornadoes were about two kilometres away from my balcony.)
So I quickly write an e-mail to a newspaper in HongKong, asking whether they are interested in such images. But now I have to start driving to the airport.
On the way, I’m already getting e-mail reply from the “South China Morning Post” – they want to publish the images if they are of good enough quality, whether I could send them for approval? I compile a quick little selection, enclose them in a PDF document and send them from the car to HongKong.
In the airport I learn that the take-off will be late, as always in recent times. At least we may soon get on the plane, but I am afraid we will be sitting on the plane and wait for hours. It turns out like that. This is annoying. But today I am saved by the “South China Morning Post”, for the photo editor in charge is calling – they want to print four of my photos and have decided which ones to take. We negotiate the price, these will be the first images I ever sold. Within the next few minutes I will get a contract, and after signature I will be asked to send the images in sufficient resolution as JPGs. And be quick, please, because they want to publish the images tomorrow, it is already late afternoon as we have been sitting on the plane for two hours, being three hours late.
Now I hope (not telling anyone on the plane!) that we will sit around yet for at least
The tornado tubes before the uninhabited island which belongs to HongKong.
another hour, for my mobile internet access is fast (3G), but not as fast as a Wi-Fi in Germany. I save the images in a size of about 5 MB per file.
Soon I get the contract, I sign by hand, digitally, on my tablet laptop, and return the contract. Out of the plane which is still standing there I am sending now one image at a time, call the editor and confirm: “All uploaded.” The flight attendant announces in unintelligible Chinese that we will depart now, being 4 . hours late, terrible, but this time to my advantage.
This is fun! Images sold commercially for the first time, the fee allows me to go eating properly about 30 times; not exciting if converted into Euros, but not a bad deal in purchasing power! Business partners from HongKong whose attention I directed to my “prank” (to make sure they buy me a few copies), tell me later in the evening that the news had told about it, saying, “Fishermen reported on tornadoes in the Bay of ShenZhen. There are no photos of the event.” Well, wait until the South China Morning Post will be published tomorrow!
The next day I find in other news websites that I was actually the only one who has documented this event in professional quality. Otherwise, there are only relatively poor images made with cell phone cameras and one very shaky video. According to statistics by the governmental weather observation station “Hong Kong Observatory”, within the last 50 years waterspouts had occurred once every other year on average, but not six in a day. The Observatory too is interested in my images, because they are documenting the entire progress. A German website dedicated to natural phenomena has a focus on “tornadoes” and has also asked for taking up my photos.
Perhaps this is the beginning of a new career as a professional photographer, once I will have enough of a life with business and chemistry?
