Exam 4

Mark Charles is a storm chaser and a weather photographer. During his career, he’s taken photos of all kinds of amazing weather, including tornadoes, thunderstorms and hurricanes. His photos have appeared in many scientific magazines.

Mark has also successfully appeared in documentaries on American TV to discuss severe weather, storm chasing and global warming. He’s an energetic and keen speaker. He’s written fascinating articles about our changing weather and is the author of a very popular blog about extreme weather and several books. So how did Mark begin his career?

Mark grew up in Wisconsin in the USA, where ice storms, blizzards, floods and tornadoes are common. When he was six years old, he saw his first hurricane at close hand and he never forgot the experience. A few years later, his mother bought him a camera. Mark was more interested in recording the sound effects of weather than taking photographs. He used to spend hours recording sound outdoors. He did it as a hobby when he was a little boy, but he soon became very interested in extreme weather. He has journals with notes and some pictures that he collected. He discovered how some weather factors interacted and when you could expect to have a thunderstorm or ice storms. He was just an observer but that was enough to teach him quite a lot about the world around him. When he was a teenager, he used to read about all sorts of extreme weather events in the newspaper and he sometimes went to the library to look for scientific magazines on specific topics. He even joined an after school club that organized trips to observe weather patterns.

Mark studied journalism, not photography, at university and began his career as a writer working on local newspapers. He was good at his job and he never regretted that he’d become a journalist, but he kept his childhood interest in storms and when, in his late twenties, he saw an advert for a storm-chasing holiday in Tornado Alley, he joined the group and took his camera with him. Eventually, Mark’s photography took over from journalism and he became the artist he is today.