Mike Theiss discusses his work as a photographer and an advocate for extreme weather awareness.
Article by Jenn Pocock
“I have this motto,” Mike Theiss tells me over the phone from Paraguay. “I never wish for natural disasters to happen, but IF it happens, I want to be there to document it and share with the world to send a message of awareness and respect for nature.”
“Respect” is the key word for Theiss, who dedicates his life to finding and capturing the world’s most dangerous storms on film.
Theiss has been shooting storms since he was eight years old, standing on the porch of his childhood home in Key Largo. He began with a video camera, watching the hurricanes roll through the Keys. It wasn’t until Hurricane Andrew, though, that he knew his future would revolve around extreme weather. He was fourteen when his family was forced to evacuate. When he returned, his community had been demolished.
“It looked like somebody had dropped a bomb. We were gone for 8 hours and when we went back, it was beautiful out. Perfectly clear skies. I just thought that I had to see what had done this in person.”
“I hate that storm-chaser, adrenaline-junky label,” says Theiss. “I just want to document these storms to share with people. If you’re going to be a journalist you need to show the worst that can happen.”
For Theiss, weather photography is bound up with a sense of duty to the people in the local communities. Weather safety, he says, begins with awareness of what weather can do—and seeing is believing.
“I once talked to a woman who rode out half of Hurricane Katrina in a tree. When I asked why she didn’t evacuate, she said ‘I wanted to stay and protect my house.’ I hear that all the time: people staying to protect their house or their possessions. It makes me angry. What are they going to do? I think that if she had seen some of my earlier footage, she would have evacuated. Instead she almost died.
“I believe that when people see the storms with their own eyes, it sends a strong message for the next time they have a hurricane or tornado heading for them. I hope it will stick with them. I hope that I can be an influence for people to evacuate to save lives.”
Theiss has been in plenty of dangerous situations, having tracked hundreds of storms. Hurricane Katrina, he said, was one of the worst. Stationed in Gulfport, Mississippi, Theiss found himself in a concrete hotel that had been fortified after Hurricane Camille nearly twenty years before. As the storm descended, 20-30ft waves crashed to the shore, obliterating the port and carrying heavy shipping containers with them.
“The containers were getting washed in and out,” he says. “They were taking out these huge oak trees that were, I don’t even know how old. It wasn’t the waves that were dangerous; it was the containers. When I came out of the hotel all the buildings around me were gone. I’m the only building left standing, literally.”
Theiss’s Hurricane Katrina video footage was nominated for an Emmy by NBC.
Among Theiss’s favorite photos is the above photo of Hurricane Noel in Nova Scotia. He achieved it through sheer luck.
“The storm was starting to peter out…it was kind of a dud. For some reason, there were these big waves. Me and another storm photographer were trying to recreate this image of waves crashing up on the shore, using a lighthouse for scale to show their size, but we couldn’t get a good photo.
All of the sudden, this huge rogue wave came through and my friend went up to the car for scale. He’s leaning back in awe, looking at it.”
It became the iconic image for the storm’s power. “It’s a shame that I wasn’t using a fish-eye lens,” Theiss says. “Even with 16mm, I couldn’t get this whole wave in the photo. There’s probably only 50% of it!”
“A great photo is one that conveys the beauty and the beast of the storm, the good and the bad,” Theiss says. “It has to really show what is happening. It’s very hard to do that, but it’s possible. Even extreme nature produces beautiful photos. I want people to not just flip past my photos, but to stop and say, ‘Wow. That happens on this planet?’”
More of Mike Theiss’s photos can be seen at NationalGeographicStock.com. Hurricane Season is coming up and his images will capture your readers’ attention.