Photographer and storm chaser Kelly DeLay was in the absolute right place at the absolute right time, and he finally caught his unicorn.
DeLay was chasing a tornado under a supercell thunderstorm through the Colorado plains a few days ago when he spotted a second tornado growing out of the same system. Even more surprising, one of them appeared to be rotating anticyclonically, or clockwise, a rare occurrence in the Northern Hemisphere.
"I’ve had this shot, a supercell with a tornado underneath, in my head for years," DeLay says. "I actually called it my unicorn because something like this had been alluding me. And I’ve never seen a supercell photo with two tornadoes underneath."
It all went down Thursday. DeLay was parked on Highway 24 between Matheson and Simla, two to three miles from the storm. He purposely stayed back and shot with a Canon 5D Mark III and a wide-angle 16-35mm lens so he could see the entire supercell.
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"I like the structure and I like to see the whole picture," says DeLay, who lives just outside Dallas. “I have an appreciation for systems themselves."
Although the tornadoes look tiny in his image, he got close enough to shoot a – video in which you see the tornado on the right is quite large. DeLay saw another weird sight just after his killer shot—a double rainbow and hail in the same storm. He got as close as he could to continue shooting, but the wind and skies grew so ominous that he hightailed it out of there.
"After I turned around I was shaking so bad my teeth were chattering uncontrollably from all the emotion," he says. "I don’t think it was fear, just intense adrenaline."
