Nicolas Gascard: eye of the storm

One day the teenage Nicolas Gascard decided to walk out of his school to take photographs of a spectacular storm and never went back. His attraction to photographing savage weather and unspoilt, wilderness landscapes continues to this day. He has recently returned from a summer of storm chasing in ‘Tornado Alley’ in the USA and took time out from shooting night skies in the Swiss mountains to talk to Joël Lacey.

Nicolas Gascard’s initial spark of interest in storms came when he witnessed an incredibly violent hailstorm as a five-year-old boy in 1986. A life-changing incident happened seven years after that, as Nicolas recalls: “On 9 June 1993 I looked on in disbelief as lightning repeatedly struck a building less than 200 metres from my village home in the south east of France. The feeling of the adrenaline coursing through my body was a revelation and I decided I must find a way to record what was in front of me.”

Having scrimped and saved for three years Nicolas bought himself an EOS 500 SLR in order to capture the weather in his region of France on film. Thus began his ongoing relationship with both extreme weather and capturing it shooting with Canon EOS cameras and EF lenses.

© Nicolas Gascard

Distant storm on a starry night in Arizona. Shot at ISO 200, a 47 second exposure at f/2.8 with EF16-35mm f/2.8L USM lens.

Before turning fully professional in 2005 Nicolas had worked as a postman, a florist and a spectacle assembler in order to finance his love of photography. He also worked for a photo agency, including a job documenting the splendour of a feast a member of the Saudi Royal family was hosting, and generally shot any kinds of pictures to earn money in order to pay for the equipment and travel needed to pursue his chosen specialism.

His education – in terms of weather – came from his grandfather, who instilled in him a love of the rugged countryside and the joy of simply being outdoors in the unspoilt plains of France under a stormy sky. On a more technical level he sought inspiration from Alex Hermant, a lightning and storm photographer who is also the founder of the world’s only Museum of Lightning (in the Auvergne, France).

His formal education, though, came to rather an abrupt end when, having had enough, he had decided he’d rather be out photographing storms than indoors in a classroom. He collected his things together just as, unexpectedly and appropriately, a huge storm started brewing. With a tone of melancholy, he remembers: “By the time I’d said my goodbyes, collected my stuff and made my exit, the storm was over.” But his interest in storms and the savage wildness of nature in general has never dimmed.

Nicolas was shooting an approaching multi-cellular storm (the kind that spawns tornadoes) in the USA, and had set his EOS-1Ds Mark III up for a long exposure of lightning strikes. Then a powerful electro-magnetic pulse from a very close second strike in his picture actually triggered the camera to record a second exposure by the sensor without his input. As he puts it: “the storm had taken a picture of itself!”

His shooting is normally rather more hands-on, and in technical terms Nicolas has three main techniques for capturing the subjects he shoots. For lightning photography he goes to an area where the meteorological circumstances are favourable, chooses the backdrop and the angle of view that he wants to frame the lightning in and then, with the camera tripod-mounted and its mirror up, he waits, remote in hand, to capture the lightning as it hits, starting the exposure in a gap between strikes.

“Ideally”, he says, ”you want to be above the subject, say about a kilometre outside a town, for example, so you can capture both the storm and see the man-made object under assault.”

Framing the subject, he decides which lens will give him the right field of view and also the right range of depth of field for the selected shot. For some, the EF16-35mm f/2.8L USM delivers the required front-to-back sharpness, for others, the throw of the EF70-200mm f/2.8L USM lets him isolate an area from its background.

© Nicolas Gascard

Lightning and cactus, Saguaro National Park, Arizona. Exposure was five seconds at f/7.1, EF24-70mm f/2.8L USM zoom lens set at 31mm.

He judges his exposures depending on the distance from the camera to the lightning strike. Nicolas explains: “More distant strikes will leave the foreground from a shorter exposure underexposed, while multiple strikes nearby will bleach out the foreground.”

As well as taking stills, Nicolas also shoots video footage of tornadoes, and last year filmed a tornado passing a few metres from his car in Geneva for the Télévision Suisse Romande TV network. However, whether chasing lightning strikes or tornadoes, Nicolas believes that the key skill lies not only in understanding the photography of the storm, but also in being fully aware of its nature: “Knowing what the storm will do is vital not only in terms of where it is and where it’s going, but also in terms of understanding how something will photograph, rather than how to photograph it. Understanding how your camera works inside is less important than understanding what a storm will do.”

He adds: “For tornado and storm photography, the principal issue is one of mobility and being in the right place at the right time.”

His wilderness photos are traditional landscapes in the sense that he frames his images and just waits, sometimes for days, for the right combination of weather and light. When CPN caught up with him he’d had yet another night without sleep as he was waiting for the right moment to capture shooting stars against the Jura’s unique backdrop.

In terms of exposures, it depends on the time of day and how little or how much depth of field he wants in an image. The fruits of this last of his three loves is a new book ‘Montagnes du Jura, nature et lumière insolites’ (‘The mountains of Jura, unparalleled light and landscapes’) that will be published by Presses du Belvédère during November 2008.

With the unpredictability of his subjects, in a typical year Nicolas had hoped to capture three or four really strong images. However he feels he can now achieve a higher ‘strike rate’ thanks to his decision to upgrade his lenses to the L-series range – he can now shoot at wide apertures in lower light levels without fear of a noticeable drop-off in quality. In addition his decision to switch his main camera body to the EOS-1Ds Mark III has helped as its sensor delivers spectacularly clean images (in terms of noise levels) when shooting images with extended exposures.

© Nicolas Gascard

Sky and mere by starlight in the Jura Mountains shot with the EOS-1Ds Mark III with EF16-35mm f/2.8L USM zoom lens set at 16mm. Exposure was ISO 500, at f/3.5 for 10 minutes.

There’s a somewhat unexpected peace about the images he shoots in the Jura; the long exposures of moving water, the sky in rotation about the Pole star, misty valleys at dawn or sunset, stand in stark (or perhaps more appropriately smooth) contrast to the violence of weather at its wildest. “It’s still nature at its most extreme,” he explains, “but here it is the landscape that is wild and the weather benign.”

The love of the wilderness, and its continued survival as an unspoilt terrain, is playing a greater role in what he shoots and forming his own philosophy. “We can create virtually anything in the consumer world, but you cannot make a stream flow again once it has dried up because all the water’s gone.”

Over the last three years, Nicolas career and output have reached new levels. His first book ‘Au coeur des orages’ ('In the heart of storms') came out in 2006; he spent much of 2007 travelling over 40,000km chasing storms wherever he could find them (although now he’s trying to be more methodical in an attempt to lighten his carbon footprint); and last May he filmed seven tornadoes in a single month.