New Mexico is known as the ‘Land of Enchantment.’ That is a fitting name for this beautiful land, with the Rockies and Great Plains and Southwestern Deserts converging to create a space that’s unique in its beauty and diversity. It’s also a place that completely rekindled my love for weather and my appreciation for the art of chasing down storms.
If you had asked me in July of 2018 if I was ever going to do weather and storms again as a photography subject, I would have probably told you no. A little over a year ago, I was preparing to move to New Mexico to start a new career after transitioning. Seemingly, storms weren’t in my future at that point.
The preceding years were incredibly difficult for me. I was beginning to feel burnt out as my pacing of chasing had gone through the roof starting in 2015 all the way to 2018. Given everything that was going on, I made the decision to publicly announce I wasn’t going to be doing anything else with storms and weather as I was completely out of ideas. That was true.
However, life was difficult a year ago and I definitely wasn’t ready or capable of making a plains season happen in 2019. That was all good for me to heal and rejuvenate. I had been doing chasing as an all consuming passion and eventually job for about a decade and the time away was incredible.
As the summer monsoon season approached, I knew it was time to return to weather. The monsoon season was something new and the exploration of the my new state was exciting. As I jotted down ideas for shoot locations, I began to get really excited about weather again. The love of storms and the weather doesn’t ever truly leave you, but I needed to rediscover that passion.
I joked on my own Twitter account (@RaychelSnr) that I was certainly going to make a lot of mistakes in my first monsoon season and that is for sure the case. However, what I captured represents the diversity of this state and the beauty of the storms that come each and every summer. This also was apparently a more quiet season, which only has me excited about the future. With 29 days of filming the summer monsoon, this is what became of those efforts.
This is Enchanted.
Spectacular!
Well done! Monsoons are always awesome! ;)