Stunning pictures of clouds, tornado and solar eclipse win UW-Madison photo contest

Kelton Halbert was chasing after supercell storms near Kansas City when he was rewarded with the view of a tornado twisting down to a farm field.

He got out of his vehicle, pulled his Fujifilm XA-2 Mirrorless digital camera to his eye and clicked away.

Halbert, 23, was recently rewarded again when his photo was chosen as the winner of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences annual photography contest administered and curated by the Space Science and Engineering Center.

In 2016 Halbert was working on his undergraduate degree at the University of Oklahoma when he and a friend decided to go storm chasing.

"There ended up being a supercell thunderstorm that produced close to 12 tornadoes in the Dodge City area, kind of out in the open field. That picture was from the first tornado from that storm that afternoon," Halbert said in a phone interview Tuesday afternoon.

He was 1½ to 2 miles from the twister. And, no, he was not worried about his safety.

"We positioned ourselves in such a way that it was actually moving away from us," said Halbert, a Nashville native who started his master's degree in atmospheric science at UW last fall.

The photo contest is open to anyone who works or takes classes in the UW Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences building. It started eight years ago as "a way to showcase how our scientists, students and faculty can see the natural world through the lens of a camera," said Jean Phillips, director of communication and library services at the Space Science and Engineering Center.

A total of 25 entries were submitted from a dozen people this year and were judged by the winners of last year's contest as well as professional photographers. They're judged on how well photos represent a weather event.

This year's winners included pictures of last summer's total solar eclipse, unusual clouds and sunsets.

Prizes include photography books. Halbert was awarded a hardcover National Geographic landscape photography book.