As hobbies go, storm chasing has got to be right up there with tap dancing on sharks, alligator wrestling or catching bullets with your teeth, but the good news is that you don’t actually have to move to the United States to try it. Well, only if you want to feel like you’re seeing the end of the world, anyway, but we’ll get to that.

Will Eades has been chasing storms across Australia with his camera for more than a decade and, as you can see from the spectacular aurora photo above, he’s seen and shot scenes of some incredible natural wonders.

Storm chasing is hopelessly difficult on foot, of course, and Will has been looking to upgrade to a suitable vehicle to support his high-adrenaline hobby, and carry his family, but when he borrowed a Mazda CX-80 for just seven days he had no idea how lucky he would get with the wild weather.

Rare Auroras, Storms and Atmospheric Phenomena

“On my second day with the car, there were reports that we were going to have a CMA, a Coronal Mass Ejection, which is basically a big blast of radioactive particles from the sun, which hurtle towards Earth at ridiculous speeds and then when they hit our magnetosphere you get an aurora, which is spectacular, but also incredibly rare at our latitude - I think we've had two of these events in the last 20 years,” Eades says, his words tumbling over one another in excitement at the memory. After parking the CX-80 at noon in the perfect spot to get what he hoped would be the perfect shot, he spent hours enjoying the Mazda’s interior as word got around, and the crowds built up.

“There would have been more than 200 people at the at the headland (near Port Macquarie in NSW) waiting for that aurora to kick off and we had perfect conditions. Just on sunset, the aurora arrived and when it got dark the sky looked physically, visibly pink with the naked eye, and then you do the long exposure with the camera, and it just went ballistic,” he recalls. 

“People were cheering and yelling, it was it was a wild experience.”

In the same week he managed to get a few more incredible shots, including the one above where the clouds look lit from within. What you’re seeing there is another rare phenomena called “sprites”.

“It’s basically a form of lightning that occurs in the upper atmosphere, which is very close to space, and can be as much as 90km above the Earth, and they’re very rare to see on the east coast of Australia,” Eades explains.

Unsurprisingly, after the week he had in the CX-80, he’s now determined to buy one, and not just because it seemed to be a good-luck charm.

“I spent the better part of three days just sitting in the car, trying to wait out the storms and the aurora,  and it was incredibly comfortable to hang out in - I’d definitely take it storm chasing,” Eades reports.

“But I was amazed at how premium it is, I just didn’t anticipate how nice it was going to be - things like the entertainment system, the head-up display, which is amazing, and the level of comfort, how good it was to drive on dirt.

“It’s also just the right size for us, because we don’t want a huge car, but we need one with the three rows and seven seats because we have two boys and we like to keep them separated. The six-year-old sits right at the back, because he has the loudest voice, and the four-year-old sits in the next row, so they can’t hit each other. It’s a divide and conquer thing.”

For now, storm chasing remains a hobby for Eades, who runs a transport company with his wife, but he’d really like to turn it into his living.

“It’s a side gig but it’s fast going from a hobby to more of a second job because I run these workshops around NSW and Victoria where I take groups of people out to remote locations and we shoot astral photography, and I’ve been associated with Nikon now for nearly nine years, so we run a lot of these photography workshops together,” he explains.

His love of shooting storms started with a lust for wildlife and nature, which developed during a childhood where he spent a lot of time on the water, and began to photograph sunsets and landscapes.

“Any dramatic scene in nature gets me going, and then some big storms passed through about 15 years ago and I got some pretty intense photographs of those and something just clicked in my head and I thought, ‘I need to go and do this.’“And it’s been a  journey that's taken me around the world since then, including to the US, where I’ve seen tornadoes, huge lightning strikes and some supercell giant storms.”

If you’re thinking of the movie Twister, or perhaps thinking that Will Eades is bonkers, you’re not alone. Surely, I ask him, the instinct when a huge storm is approaching is to run away, but he just grabs his camera and holds on, why?

“Well they can be incredibly intimidating if you've never seen one before - I remember in Nebraska we had one coming at us and it was fantastic, this big, sculpted supercell and when it came over our heads it kind of dawned on me how big this thing actually was,” he recalls.

“Think of it as like the biggest mountain in the world starting to move over your head, I mean these things can go up 50,000 or 60,000 feet, and this one had a big, wave-type feature that they call a whale’s mouth, where the leading edge of the storm kind of opens up and you feel like you're inside the storm. And I did think, ‘Wow, this is a bit more than I expected.’ It was like looking at the end of the world.

“So that was quite intense and we got in the car at that point and the supercell put down a tornado a short way behind us and we had to drive away to get out of the path. So, yes, that's the real deal of storm chasing.

“But I think it’s like anything that has a degree of risk in nature, you know you see people rock climbing on these incredible cliffs and as a spectator you think you could never do that, but it’s about knowing what you’re doing and what you’re dealing with.

“And I think if you’re running away from the storm because you don’t understand what you’re looking at, then you’re missing out on one of the best shows in nature.”

Eades is at pains to point that he does not live at the pointy end of storm chasing thrill seekers and that generally he is watching these events from what he considers a safe distance.

“When you picture me standing near a tornado I’m not generally within 100km of it, but some of these chasers will get into fully armoured vehicles and drive within 100m of the tornado and photograph it, put scientific probes into it, but that’s a whole other level,” he says, shaking his head.

“They've got big hydraulic screws that dig into the ground to anchor the car in case the tornadoes go over the top of them and they've got Kevlar armour to protect them from flying debris, like a fence post, which would go straight through the Mazda when the wind is moving at that speed, but I wouldn’t let that happen.

“What we do in Australia is a bit more tame. I mean, I like shooting lightning, and you know we still get good storms here, but the US is a whole different kettle of fish.”