Nick Moir's guide to storm-chasing in Australia

A storm is a fantastic thing to chase. It's awesome to be underneath a powerful storm when it is doing its thing.  But storm-chasing in Australia can be a frustrating interest.

I set off  down the Hume Highway at 7am on Thursday, heading for the Victorian border. I was keeping in contact with other storm-chasers in the region - some are photographers, some are maths teachers - as we sought out the front.

The weather models that we use showed there were going to be severe storms around Holbrook.

But the chase through southern NSW this time almost resulted in what we term a "bust chase", where you get nothing at the end of it, and the culprit was the usual suspect – not enough moisture.

You need to have humidity for a good storm. But the atmosphere resembled something from a desert – very dry - which is no good for storm-chasing.

The weather models we use can be outrageously deceiving if not studied well. And this time they were wrong. The storms were all stuck way east of where I was at Holbrook.

So I turned around and headed back towards the Brindabellas, near Canberra, where I could see storms were forming. But they weakened as I neared them.

Then about 5pm, one storm cell started moving north near Gunning and strengthened rapidly.

I raced up parallel to it and then jumped ahead of it, where its impressive northern edge was threatening the remote regions north of Crookwell.

Capturing some lightning and the beautiful greenish base of the storm, I allowed it to pass over me, which is when the bulbous "Mammatus" was lit up by the late afternoon light.

Now the challenge was to actually find something to have in the foreground. I settled on the orange path to a rural property that I had passed four times looking for something else.

I stopped then. I knew I'd got a good photograph.

It was a long drive back but it was satisfying knowing I had a decent picture.