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.