Mike Mezeul II is a Texas-based photographer who’s used to shooting everything from professional sporting events to music concerts. It’s when he positions his camera up to the sky, however, that the real magic happens. The photographer isn’t afraid to chase huge thunderstorms or surreal-looking mammatus clouds. Over the last fifteen years, he’s traversed thousands of miles to get the perfect shot.
To him, the parts of the storm that are visually intriguing are the clouds.
As he states, “I was always the little kid staring up at the clouds, whether it was lying on the picnic table at recess or just out the car window, the sky has always fascinated me. When I got my first camera at the age of 15, I wanted to take pictures, of course, of the clouds. So I photographed every sunset and sunrise I could, but then realized I could learn how to photograph lightning. With the crazy storms we got in Texas, why not? So I taught myself long exposure photography and since I didn’t have a license or a car, I removed every window screen from the second story of my parents house and with every storm that rolled through, I was perched at one of those windows. When I got my license, it was all downhill from there. I went out to open fields to photograph lightning, and with time, I began learning more and more about storms and how they work.
“Over the past fifteen years, that obsession from the lying on the picnic table has turned into spending each spring traversing thousands of miles across the central plains in search of massive supercell thunderstorms…camera in hand, of course.”
