This thread is highlighting that some of the phenomena mentioned (hordes of "YouTube famous" chasers live streaming close intercepts on almost every event, amazing drone footage becoming the norm, etc.) are contributing heavily to a vibe shift in my personal chasing the past few years.
I started in 2006, and I was immediately focused on shooting stills with DSLRs. It was a small niche at first, which was great. It felt like for at least my first decade, on storms that weren't completely swarmed by the hordes (still an occasional possibility then), I had a realistic chance of getting some of the best quality stills for any given storm I saw. There were other chasers shooting with DSLRs who were better than me at it, but not that many; the vast majority were more focused on video, whose image quality lagged much further behind pro-grade cameras than modern 4-8K footage does. There's something about the
possibility of being the only person to document a storm with excellence through a relevant medium that makes chasing fundamentally more captivating, compared to when that possibility collapses from oversaturation... or because the medium is no longer very relevant.
Anymore, the probability that whatever media I collect on a chase will be "the shot" (even just from one subcategory... like, say, the best quality stills of the structure+tor) is ~0. To be sure, it rarely worked out that way even 15 years ago. But it
could happen every so often, if only 2 or 3 other people on the same storm were laser focused on stills, and the quality of most video kinda sucked. Now, it's not only extremely likely that someone else among the hordes will get better stills... it's also likely that traditional stills from the ground won't even be that impressive or relevant compared to other novel forms of media.
Accepting this compels me to let go of whatever subconscious ego-driven or competitive elements may have be lurking in my chasing motives. I have to recognize that since circa 2020, the only legitimate reason for me to chase is the raw experience... forget everything and everyone outside of my own vehicle. It's like the next evolution in the "no one cares" mantra that I believe
@Dan Robinson coined to emphasize that 99.9% of us shouldn't expect to quit our day jobs. That's been obvious and easy to accept for decades. But now we must also accept that, as individuals outside the YouTube-famous or Twitter-famous contingent, no one even in the weather community is likely to care about what we capture. The Amistad NM storm a few weeks ago gave me some of my best captures ever, but before I could even get to a motel in Amarillo, social media was filled with dozens of nearly identical shots... so I was and still am in no rush to finish editing them. That pretty much sums up the media/content environment now.
I still put a lot of (perhaps too much?) effort into capturing media, but realistically, it's only for personal enjoyment and documentation. The bar for capturing content that will stand as the definitive documentation of a good storm, let alone make a meaningful profit, just keeps floating higher out of reach. In order to be "competitive" in that sense, you probably have to stray so far from the experience I'm after that it would ruin everything. Maybe that's the crux of this thread topic. Shooting reasonably good stills just came naturally as part of chasing the way I want to. Whereas trying to compete for the best drone footage, for example, I imagine would feel like a big sideshow that distracts from the reason I'm out there in the first place. Similarly, trying to compete with the now sizable clan of successful streamers who have teams dedicated to running their channel is grossly unappealing.
I imagine myself and others like me are basically just going through the same core experience that veterans like Warren, Chuck, et al. did in the 90s-00s when stock photography and videography began plummeting in value... minus any financial stress, since profit was already a pipe dream even when I started!
