Some words about me: my name is Christian Neumann. I was born the 14th of April 1965 in Berlin, but I grew up in a small country town north of Hamburg, Germany. Already as a child I was interested in nature and I am glad that my Dad supported my interests. I spent the hours after school and the weekends exploring the woods and fields around my home town, watching birds, collecting feathers, owl pellets and other things which attracted my interest. At the age of 11, I collected my first fossil sea urchin on a gravel road close to my parents house (it was a glacial erratic Galerites vulgaris from the Late Cretaceous). This was the starting point of my palaeontological career. From this time onwards, I spent more and more time collecting fossils in the gravel pits and chalk quarries in the vicinity of my home town. As my collection grew, I felt that I should specialize. I always found that sea urchins (and other echinoderms) are the most beautiful and most fascinating of all fossils - now I understand that my very first finding was a pointer of destiny: Finally, I became curator of the fossil echinoderm collection at the Berlin Museum of Natural History!
Although I specialized on palaeontology rather early in my life, I am still interested in other fields of natural history, especially bird-watching. I moved to (West) Berlin for studying geology in 1987 and when the wall came tumbling down in 1989, fantastic new opportunities were offered in the now accessible 创untouched创 and unpopulated areas (at least that磗 how they appeared to me) of Eastern Germany and Poland. Meanwhile, simply 创birding创 is not satisfying me and I get more and more involved into bird- and wildlife photography.
But how did I get interested in photographing storms and severe weather? Well, this is because of one fateful experience not so long ago: In May, 2007 I joined a palaeontological conference at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in Hays/Kansas. It was on the early evening of May 4 that I witnessed one of the most severe tornado outbreaks of the last decades on the central plains.
创The May 2007 Tornado Outbreak was an extended tornado outbreak that started on May 4, 2007, affecting portions of the Central United States. The most destructive tornado in the outbreak occurred on the evening of May 4 in central Kansas, where about 95% of the city of Greensburg in Kiowa County was destroyed by an EF5 tornado. The supercell killed at least 13 people including 11 in Greensburg and two in Pratt County by a separate tornado. At least 60 people were injured in Greensburg alone. It was the strongest tornado of an outbreak which included several other tornadoes reported across Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas and South Dakota that occurred on the same night. 25 tornadoes were confirmed that night创
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_2007_Tornado_Outbreak)
Although Hays is about 70 miles north of Greensburg, the storms were moving north and we were in the line of fire. I was scared and asked the motel staff (watching sports on tv) for the next tornado shelter. 创We keep you informed if there will be any tornado!创 was the answer I received. The guy behind the desk was obviously amused. You can believe, this is rather irritating for a European greenhorn who is not familiar with life on "tornado alley". However, since that day, I keep my eyes open and I always scan the sky for any signs of thunderstorms. Soon, fear was replaced by fascination and although the weather of Europe is pretty much different from that of the American Midwest, it has many opportunities to offer and I enjoy photographing the beauty and drama of our atmosphere (I guess psychologists would call it 创mastering the tornado trauma创!). |
