When Artistry SnowballsHastings photographer Jorn Olsen captures Nebraska by storm. Story
by Kristen Friesen |
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JUNE 12, 2004 WAS A DARK AND STORMY AFTERNOON. It was also Jorn Olsen’s 55th birthday, and his wife, Mary, had made dinner reservations for the entire family. When the weather service issued a tornado watch for Hastings at 4 p.m., the Olsen clan decided to stay home. The storm blew through and, by 6:45, Mary was gathering everyone on the back patio to watch the sky make a spectacle of itself. True to form, Jorn was running for his camera.
“Old timers call them angel butts,” Olsen said of the mammatus clouds that he photographed that night. Mammatus clouds result from sinking air beneath a dissipating thunderstorm. While somewhat common in Nebraska, the mammatus clouds over Adams County that summer evening were incredibly low and stunningly beautiful, a “once in a lifetime occurrence,” Olsen said.
Olsen had been dabbling in photography since he purchased his first digital camera in 1997. “I’d take my camera into the duck blind to keep my friends from fibbing about how many they shot,” he said. “Pretty soon, I was taking pictures of the sunrise on the way out and the sunset as we headed home.”
That birthday evening, before the clouds and the sunlight disappeared, Olsen drove around Hastings, shooting the odd cloud formations set as the backdrop for Hastings landmarks. A few days later, he sent the photos to a co-worker at Hastings’ Dutton-Lainson Company.
“And that’s where things snowballed,” Olsen said.
Olsen’s co-worker forwarded them to another employee who emailed them to a friend who had connections at University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s meteorology department, and the photos ended up on their website. But that wasn’t the half of it.
A few months later, a stranger from Nebraska saw the photos and emailed them to his girlfriend who sent them in to KUSA-TV, Denver’s superstation, where they landed on the evening news, and giving photography credit to the man who had sent them to his girlfriend.
Well, at the same time, Olsen had been in contact with a man from Colorado who was inquiring about purchasing one of Olsen’s cloud photos. When the man saw the photos on the evening news, attributed to someone else, he phoned Olsen, inquiring whether he was an imposter.
Olsen contacted the television station which quickly apologized and, to make it right, aired a five-minute segment about Olsen and his photos. A few minutes later, Olsen’s new website server crashed when it received more traffic than it could handle. Once it was up and running, his site received close to half a million hits from more than 115 countries. The stunned photographer was left with fresh perspective on his rained-out 55th birthday.