Storm Chaser : Photography: Warren Faidley is obsessed with finding--and filming--the perfect tornado. But it was lightning that made him famous.

Warren Faidley’s obsession recently took him to the plains of Kansas, where he found himself barreling down a two-lane highway in a rented Thunderbird, trying to outrun the tornado that was roaring up behind him.

It was a close shave. The whirring funnel cloud sailed over the roof of Faidley’s car, bringing with it a rush of wind that sucked stacks of papers out the driver’s window, scattering them all over Kansas 281.

“It was like something out of ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ ” says Faidley, 35, who bills himself as the world’s only photographer specializing in severe weather. “It was the most dangerous situation I’ve ever been in. Tornadoes were popping out all over the place.

“But this is my obsession, getting the ultimate tornado photograph--full-frame, tube on the ground.”

That picture eluded him this tornado season, despite his driving an estimated 20,000 miles, from eastern New Mexico through northern Nebraska, seeking out the ominous clouds that everybody else runs from. He calls it “chasing.”

A typical day of chasing begins at 7 a.m. in a small-town motel. To determine where he needs to be that day, Faidley watches the Weather Channel or a PBS-TV show for pilots called “AM Weather.” With information from those sources, he dials into a telephone service called Weather Fax.

A recording offers a menu of options, each of which details weather conditions in specific areas. Push one button for surface conditions. Another gives wind direction. A third details dew points.

After telling the computer what he needs to know, Faidley hangs up and waits. A few minutes later, his portable fax spits out reports and maps that he uses to decide the general area where that day’s storm is likely to happen.

His exact destination is a matter of deduction. He must take a large area and boil it down, using the reports and his own meteorological judgment. If Faidley needs to update information during the day, he might stop at a pay phone, hook his fax to it and call Weather Fax again.

When he decides on the spot he wants, preferably one with an escape road nearby, he drives there and waits. The ideal place is at the southwest edge of a storm. Funnel clouds normally form there and trail the storm as it turns northeast.

But tornadoes are moody, capable of changing direction in an instant. The storm that chased Faidley down that Kansas highway turned around and headed straight for his car. His description of the U-turn he pulled sounds like something out of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon.

During his frantic getaway, he passed scraps of farm equipment and pieces of houses that the storm had dumped on the road. “I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach,” he says. “I wondered, ‘My God, what if there’s a body out here?’ I thought I was in a war zone.”

Which is where Faidley might have wound up if his boyhood dream of becoming a Navy pilot had come true. But when he was a sophomore in college, his eyesight declined--from 20-20 to 20-40--enough to keep him out of the cockpit. “I was so depressed that when the (U.S. Air Force) Thunderbirds came to town, I left,” he says.

Photography came next. As a journalism major at the University of Arizona, he began free-lancing for the wire services and local newspapers. This was 1983, a year in which southern Arizona experienced a major flood.

“It was the first weather stuff I’d shot, and that’s when I learned nobody was shooting weather,” says Faidley. “I had houses collapsing into rivers and I thought, ‘This is fun.’ ”

In 1988, after three years as a staff photographer for the Tucson Citizen, Faidley quit to go out on his own. Within a month, a freak October thunderstorm moved through Tucson, and he nabbed the picture of a lifetime.

Seeking cover from the rain, Faidley scurried beneath an overpass to set up his camera. He waddled along in the dark beneath a low overhang, aiming a flashlight and using his tripod to fight his way through thick cobwebs jumping with black widow spiders.

As the rain intensified and water rushed down through the cracks in the road, the ground around him was alive with the spiders.

Praying he wouldn’t be bitten, Faidley set up his camera, aiming it at a fuel depot 400 feet away. He framed the shot, set the F-stop, left the shutter open and backed up, waiting for the lightning to do the work.

Just then, a bolt hit a telephone pole 20 feet away. The strike was so powerful that it knocked Faidley off his feet, and he nearly kicked his camera over, which would have ruined the picture.

“It was like a bomb exploding next to me,” he says. “The light blinded me. I smelled the ozone and felt the shock wave from the electricity.”

But his first concern was to leave the shutter open for another 10 to 15 seconds. That accomplished, he quickly opened it again when the depot’s siren began to wail. He thought the place was going to blow, and he wanted to get it on film.

There was no explosion. But Faidley had good reason to suspect that his timing on the lightning had been pinpoint--the strike was so bright that when he clamped his eyes shut, he could see the image of the bolt reflected on his retina.

The photograph, one of the closest ever taken of lightning, drew intense interest from scientists. Phil Krider, director of the University of Arizona’s Institute of Atmospheric Physics, wrote a paper analyzing the shot, and NASA experts had it digitized.

“I’m always interested in seeing Warren’s work,” Krider says. “It (the lightning photograph) was interesting because it showed the discharge at the point where the lightning was striking.

“The probability of seeing the actual point where lightning strikes is small,” Krider says. “I’ve seen maybe a half-dozen such photos in 20 years. This was the most unusual. We don’t really understand the physics of how lightning strikes the ground. The photo provided some new information.”

But more important for Faidley, Life published the photo in February, 1989, and his career soared. He received hundreds of calls from editors requesting lightning pictures. “Suddenly I was Joe Lightning photographer,” says Faidley, a smart promoter who did nothing to dispel the image.

Today, Faidley runs his own photo agency, based in Tucson, called Weatherstock, and his pictures are marketed by seven agents around the world.

His work is featured in a children’s book entitled “Lightning,” he has done five video documentaries on severe weather and he was recently hired by a film company to design a special effects tornado. He also appeared in a National Geographic segment of “Explorer.”

“Until the Life photo, I was an ex-newspaper photographer, eating Rice-a-Roni and bread for dinner,” says Faidley. “It really gave me a boost.”

Ability is only one reason Faidley has the severe-weather market to himself. Another is that most photographers are unwilling to endure the stresses of driving 500 to 600 miles a day, eating bad food, sleeping in questionable motels and spending thousands of dollars of their own money on the slim chance of bagging the big picture.

Then there is the danger. Faidley claims that he is no adrenalin junkie and that he has great respect for tornadoes. But he acknowledges the excitement of getting close to one of the most powerful forces in nature.

“You have to make quick decisions that are life and death, and the moment slows down,” he says. “It’s thrilling. But I’d rather be a half mile away from that thrill than under it.”

He has thought about dying, too: “I love life, and I’d hate for it to end. If I had become a pilot, there’d be danger, too. But I think the secret of life is to have one ultimate goal that is always eluding you. And for the last three years, it’s been the tornado shot.”

As he awaits next year’s spring tornado season, Faidley will spend the summer in Tucson shooting more lightning. In September, he expects to be chasing hurricanes in either the Gulf of Mexico or Florida--unless his plans are interrupted by a major disaster.

“I’ve worked out several contingency plans for getting into L.A. in a hurry if the city is wiped out in an earthquake,” says Faidley, who always keeps some of his gear packed so that he can be on the move to any emergency within five minutes. “Ideas like getting there by motorcycle, or chartering a boat up from San Diego. I’ve even thought of parachuting onto the beach. I like to be prepared.”