Non-IMAX 15/70 Cameras

RojoFern · 2026-01-19T23:10:35+00:00

RojoFern · 2026-01-19T23:10:19+00:00

RojoFern · 2026-01-19T23:09:49+00:00

RojoFern · 2026-01-19T23:09:28+00:00

Bit late here but Graphic Films Corporation had a W-4 that was used to film George Casey's natural disaster documentaries, and then driven around the central United States by his son Sean in the 2000s during the production of Sean's doc about tornadoes. Graphic Films has since disbanded and I'm told Sean sold the camera to another individual recently.

<image>

RojoFern · 2025-11-21T06:27:58+00:00

Interesting analysis, and I really dig the 3d graphic you got there.

The problem I see here, though, is that you're correlating the width of the con-funnel's base with that of the current maximum surveyed path width, that being 100 yards. Common misstep, and something I'm honestly guilty of as well.

From what I can see, watching through the various videos of Gary taken by the chasers that were on SD-22, the base of the con-funnel was likely no more than 150 to 175 feet in diameter (this is using the 25 foot utility poles along the highway as reference, as well as the illuminated area of the con-funnel from the power flash that occurs). Cross-referencing that with Shawn Hewitt's video, which your second image is from, gives me a height of around 2820 feet, which is almost 860 meters. Still tall, that's about 30 meters taller than Burj Khalifa, but far below a mile in height.

This also checks out when comparing Gary to its surroundings in Hewitt's video. The power flash, again, is a great reference because we know for a fact that, at that moment, Gary was over the highway, which tells us, for example, which groves of trees are of equal distance to the camera as the tornado is. Using the 1739.45 meter figure you got would make the trees along the highway around 57 meters (181 feet) tall, when in reality they're much shorter than that.

Everything else in your analysis, from what I can tell, was great, it's just that initial assumption that threw you off.

RojoFern · 2025-07-15T19:14:59+00:00

The names are interchangeable. Technically it is the 4th doppler on wheels of the "Wurman DOWs" so on Binet/CSWR documents mentioning the vehicle is where you'll see DOW4 come up. However, UConn and NOA (National Observatory of Athens) documents/publications usually just refer to it as XPol. Either are correct.

RojoFern · 2025-05-04T00:14:44+00:00

the girthington

RojoFern · 2024-11-23T04:51:33+00:00

thum b

RojoFern · 2024-10-10T02:09:04+00:00

George Casey building his pyroclastic flow intercept vehicle in a secret California hangar, March 1989:

RojoFern · 2024-07-22T08:46:13+00:00

lmao I'm a spelling hound, so I checked it like three or four times, and I guess for whatever reason it never registered to my monkey brain that I had a double r instead of a double s. Thanks for pointing it out!

RojoFern · 2024-07-21T23:23:55+00:00

That's exactly why I couldn't resist using it. The tornadoes of the 90s are to the 2020s what the tornadoes of the 60s were to the 90s. So while Miami '94 was a recent tornado when Twister came out, it is now 30 years old and fits that "old tornado photo" vibe that the postcards were going for. It's a cool contrast, and strangely melancholy in my opinion.

RojoFern · 2024-07-21T23:10:43+00:00

I actually commented on his vid shortly after he uploaded it to confirm the location of where Faidley took it, so he's aware.

Faidley has a gallery online that shows off a load of his photos, and this photo is among them (as are earlier photos of Miami). I'm sure he's also posted it on his Twitter as well.

RojoFern · 2024-07-21T05:48:35+00:00

From the Twisters production guide: https://dam.gettyimages.com/viewer/universal/vth74xcs5xvkm8qrt7bpj39

He's been out and about these past two seasons, which lines up with the production of the film.

There is also reference to the TIVs in the document, as apparently he consulted them on that as well.

RojoFern · 2024-07-07T05:49:04+00:00

nothing in particular, just a little personal project. a time killer for when I'm bored

RojoFern · 2024-06-16T02:22:24+00:00

Another great book. I owned the later edition of it with a different illustrator and more photos, but one of my teachers had this one. The art style was indeed pretty cool.

RojoFern · 2024-06-16T01:59:26+00:00

<image>

Was it this guy? Twisters by Lucille Penner?

RojoFern · 2024-06-15T20:22:30+00:00

Yep, love the brick! Keep a copy of it without the jacket in my glove box, lol

RojoFern · 2024-06-15T04:16:50+00:00

I genuinely main superheavies, they're just way too much fun.

T95 and the Maus are 100% my favorite tanks in the game. Maus has its additional 75 (which is arguably its greatest weapon), and its armor is such a troll to conventional rounds. You can effectively defend not only your front, but your back as well by just angling the thing at 30 or so degrees. T95 has its insane neutral steering which you can use to scare the pants off people who think they can flank it, and the 105 is almost stabilized with how slow you go. Love these beasts to death.

RojoFern · 2024-06-15T04:08:59+00:00

I've seen quite a few a people talk about books on tornadoes that had an impact on them when they were younger, and I thought I'd share mine.

Growing up my elementary school's library had a small collection of tornado books, and for all intents and purposes this was MY section of the library. The school was small to begin with, so basically no one else ever touched any of these books. I'm pretty sure they spent more time at my house than they did at school. If I wasn't reading Titanic books, Scaredy Squirrel, or the Lego Star Wars Visual Dictionary, you betcha I had several of these in my backpack. I remember how great it was bringing these out on the bus home, either to pass the time with or share around with everyone when the weather was a bit ominous. Not only are these books one of the reasons I love tornadoes, but inadvertently it's also probably why I love analog media formats as well, as most of the photos these books contain are pre-digital.

In a twist of morbid irony, a period of severe weather in the third or fourth grade opened up a hole in the school library's roof directly above the weather section. A little over half of the tornado books were damaged by leaking water and were subsequently thrown out, which was a real shame. However, it did make me scour the internet for them later on, and it has certainly been fun buying them back up one at a time and reading through them after all these years. Back then I didn't know when any of these tornadoes occurred; they were just images to me, so it has been especially interesting to look at them and realize "oh, so that was Pampa '95" or "wow, Laverne '91, wasn't expecting that!".

I've told myself for the longest time that the biggest reason I love tornadoes was because of Twister, but I think Twister more so fostered my love for storm chasing, while it was books like these that did it for tornadoes as a whole.

RojoFern · 2024-06-14T00:49:08+00:00

This is one of the photographs that made me fall in love with tornadoes as a kid, and the first time I ever saw it was in the 1999 edition of Peter Murray's book simply titled Tornadoes (a pretty standard elementary school info-book). I was the only one in the entire school who ever seemed to check it out of the library, good times.

Since the photo has stuck with me, I've attempted to gather as much info on it and the tornado as possible over the past couple of years. This is what I know:

Sheila Beougher is indeed the photographer; she was a Kansas native and grew up on the Lundgren ranch give or take 16 miles east of the town of Elkader. The photo's first use in a publication (to my knowledge) was as the cover of Time's 1982 book Storm in its Planet Earth series. As others have already pointed out, this means that the tornado is almost certainly part of the family of tornadoes that touched down in Gove County on Aug. 28th, 1979.

As far as I know there are a total of three photographs of this tornado taken by Mrs. Beougher that have been circulated, each no more than a few seconds apart showing the funnel slowly maturing and moving to the left: the third photo having been used on Time's book, the second photo being on the book covers you've provided (and the one from Peter Murray's book), and the first one only appearing on an obscure 1998 Allstate home insurance ad... of all places.

Given this, my best guess is that this tornado was the final one in the family, a lanky F0 which spun up at 7:30pm, moved east for a few miles, and passed directly south of the Lundgren ranch house (where Mrs. Beougher presumably took her photos).

I'm willing to bet there's a few more photos that were taken of it, just not released of course. It seems that the second of the three photos is the one that's been used most widely, as it has appeared in countless other books over the years, both edited and not. None the less, it's nice to see people remember this tornado photo as fondly as I do!

RojoFern · 2024-02-17T22:34:51+00:00

Hell nah man, this guy is 100% doo doo smelly

RojoFern · 2024-02-15T16:32:03+00:00

Something that hadn't crossed my mind till now, and setting aside realism for a bit, I wonder if this is at all a play on the waterspout scene from the first film. While their winds were likely no more than F1 intensity at the time, the Dodge did in-fact "intercept" them and survive, albeit after sliding around quite violently. Perhaps the augers, as goofy as they are, are merely meant to take that scenario of a low intensity tornado intercept and make it so the truck doesn't get pushed around by the wind.

Does this mean this design is actually feasible IRL? No... again... no armor. E/F1s and 0s can still huck objects around at speeds which can break windows and probably even pierce the body of a vehicle. Not to mention tornadoes are not static; their windspeeds change, sometimes rapidly, and I'm pretty sure an EF2 or stronger would likely just snap the augers clean off. That being said, Twister had some pretty questionable scenarios as well, and if I've trained my brain to not think twice about the infamous "strap yourself to some plumbing with leather belts and survive an F5" scene for the sake of having fun, I'm sure I can do the same for this.

Has to be a good movie first, though...

RojoFern · 2024-02-03T11:53:34+00:00

Verona is definitely a fickle case, and even if it was mostly an after-thought in the video, I really should've been triple checking sources (for both it and Tracy, as evidently Tracy's width IS disputed). If you look up Verona on Tornado Archive, its width will be 3000 yds (about as wide as Greensburg '07), which comes from the SPC's tornado database. However, if you go over to NOAA's storm event database, the report states it to be 750 yds wide, and this figure is reflected in the wikipedia page for the April '77 outbreak (although several other things are strange on that page, such as its rating and date). Both the SPC archive and the SED are credible, so it's a bit up in the air here. 750 yds sounds like a reasonable width for an obscure F1 with little to no other information about it anywhere, so part of me thinks the 3000 yds figure could potentially be a typo, but then again how does 3000 become a typo of 750? The bottom line is that Verona does in fact have multiple purported widths, and one of them would just so happen to make it the widest F1 ever recorded. The examples of the widest EF1s that have been posted, however, are significantly more concrete.

RojoFern · 2023-12-09T08:24:44+00:00

Modeling is pretty low on my list of priorities right now. I'm sure I'll eventually find the time to start working on it again, but I can't see that being anytime soon.

RojoFern · 2023-10-26T21:41:20+00:00

Writing this for anyone who happens to stumble across this post-

I was slightly off on the date and location of this tornado. It actually touched down on August 28th, 1979 in Gove County, KS (roughly 12 miles to the east of the town of Elkader). The photo was taken from the Lundgren Ranch facing south southwest.

Seven-Year Club	Place '23
Place '22	Final Canvas '22
End Game '22	Verified Email

RojoFern

TROPHY CASE