When weather conditions get ugly or destruction hits, I try to be there with my camera. Frankly, I’m surprised that I haven’t gone storm chasing yet.

This is a photo I took in 2013 in Riverside, Illinois.   It was late in the afternoon several hours after the flood waters crested. The flooding was crazy; I took this photo two streets away from the river. But this photo isn’t about the water, it’s really about the yoga ball.

I was walking around shooting, saw the ball drifting towards me on top of the water and thought it’d make a great photo, the yoga ball acting as an accent piece to the scene. What I didn’t realize was how fast the ball was traveling. The currents in the flood waters were swift! Since there wasn’t much light, I was shooting on a tripod.  And, my god, was that stupid ball moving!  It was moving so fast, it actually ended up blurry in my photos. It also continually moved out of frame.

What this meant was that every four pictures or so, I’d slosh over to the ball, drop kick it as far as I could down the street, fire off a few photos and wait for it to come sailing back in my direction when I would repeat the process. This photo worked because the ball got stuck on something under the water halting its progress; it could have been a fire hydrant, a stick or a large, angry fish, I don’t know. Whatever it was, it enabled me to get the picture I wanted. And thus ended my experiment with shooting floating yoga balls.