One of my favorite weather scenarios to photograph is bright sunlight in front of a storm system. The sun will highlight everything in the foreground beautifully and the impending storm will make the sky extremely interesting visually.

I lucked out recently and not only nailed this weather combo, but was able to then get up off the ground to shoot the storms rolling in. I took this photo of the a mid-afternoon storm system from atop an eight-story building in Lyons, Illinois. Looking northwest, I could just see wave after wave of storms heading my way… and it was awesome. The clouds rolled right overhead and, as is always the case when shooting storms, by the time the first raindrop hit, I was already done.

What makes this photo for me, outside of the above contrast between brightness and darkness, is the row of houses in the lower right of the photo that feel almost like miniatures. They disappear into the trees suggesting that there is a whole other world below the tree line.