Capturing the Perfect Storm in Texline

Dallas-based photographer Sean Fitzgerald was exploring the Rita Blanca National Grasslands near Texline on an October afternoon when the winds picked up and storm clouds formed to the west. “As I watched, the clouds swirled into the kind of shapes and forms that make photographers delirious,” he says. Fitzgerald hopped into his truck and drove until he found a vista free of telephone lines and other barriers. “I finally found a small rise where I could show the sky along with a bit of the prairie,” he says. “As I set up, a thin band of rain in the far distance briefly flared, backlit by the late afternoon sun. I gleefully took this image, and then the rains stopped and the clouds shifted again into something else.”