On my way from Las Vegas, New Mexico to Amarillo, Texas I crossed the Llano Estacado from west to east as a fierce thunderstorm blew in from the North. I had come through the edge of the storm and knew there was both lightning and hail associated with the cell; so I decided my best tactic was to outrun it, but its beauty was too great to ignore. So I would drive as quickly as I could to get far enough ahead so that I could stop, grab my gear, and compose an image or two before the rain began to overtake me again. This game of cat and mouse went on for about 40 miles until it began to be so dark my shutter speeds were becoming longer than I wanted. This was the final image, taken just as the sun began to slip below the horizon. In the end I felt like the Gingerbread Man, but with the hope that I might actually get away from something seemingly determined to devour me. I decided that the story of the storm was best told through wide-angle landscape eyes, so I used a focal length of 27mm to give me the angle-of-view I wanted. I was far enough away from the elements of my image that f/11 gave me depth-of-field. As you can see, the wind was blowing the grasses in the foreground, but a shutter speed of 1.0 second managed to provide some detail in them. At ISO 100 these settings gave me an overall slightly darker-than-medium exposure. A Llano Estacado storm through the Gingerbread Man’s eyes.