Something new is coming and I’m crazy excited about it, also a little nervous and unsure. Reception so far has been incredible tho, I’m so thankful.

I feel like there is a real void out there for rewarding all the incredibly hard work that goes into storm photography. Not to mention contests that want commercial rights to your images and turn everything into a popularity contest.

The mission is to truly recognize and reward the best photos from the past year of storm photography. Judged by people who know what it takes to get those images. Really excited about the contest launching on Feb 1st!

Since this is our initial year and we’re keeping it small, there are only two awards (at this time)…Photo of the Year and Storm Photographer of the Year. We also just have three judges to get an idea on how it will go Mike Mezeul, Nick Page and myself.

Looking forward to expanding the award categories next year (real pumped for that!) and also adding more judges, especially introducing more diversity into that group. Also a little nervous at the daunting task of trying to sift through all the awesome to figure out the winners 🙂

The more images I see from last year, the more I know this will be a tough task. Hoping this contest turns into a great way to have a cool archive of the best storm images every year, and to get people pumped for storm season (at least here in the US, storm seasons happen different times elsewhere!)

Also, of course this is open Internationally! Even though the US is known for our supercells/tornadoes/monsoon, there are places in the world with some epic weather. I hope to see some haboob images from Australia and lightning photos from Italy entered!

Well that’s about it…been non-stop writing content, designing the site, working with our friend David Erichsend on development and getting things ready for the launch. Thankful for all the words of support, keeps me going! And to Paige Vincent for the awesome logo 🙂