Severe storm photos

This storm hit Joplin, Missouri last night, spawning a tornado that killed many people. The numbers are still rising as I write this.

At the time, Mary remarked that the clouds looked pretty. And they do. But their fluffy appearance comes from powerful updrafts. They looked almost like steam boiling atop a kettle.

The view in that first photo is roughly east to southeast. I took it with the Kodak Z1285 using the camera's internal stitching software. Afterward, I corrected some of the distortion in Zoner Photo Studio, straightening that light pole in the middle but making the edges distort almost like a fish-eye lens.

The bottom photo was taken less than half an hour later. The storm stretches from east to south, growing as it moved. This was taken with the same camera with the lens zoomed to about 100 mm. They were stitched in Zoner. The right most ones are out of focus but it looks OK in the smaller sizes. The original was over 30 megs!