"Only three components make up a good storm, moisture, wind, and heat, if you get a perfect mixture of these three ingredients, you will have something to shoot by the end of the day."

A. T. Willett developed a lifelong fascination with dangerous storms, when as a small child a tornado damaged houses in his, Chicago suburb, neighborhood. What started as a passion for storms has developed into a career specializing in photographing dangerous storms, lightning, and tornados.

" I remember when I was five years old, my family would seek shelter by sleeping under the stairs in the basement of our house when tornado warnings would come across the radio in the middle of the night."

Willett, 44, has lived in Tucson Arizona since moving there with his family in 1971, with the exception of the year he spent in New York City. Starting his career at the Tucson Citizen as a photojournalist in 1983 for the local Gannet newspaper at the age of nineteen. Tools of the trade above your press pass can get into many situation the vehicle pass would sometime get you in to scene where police had blocked the road and the reporters note pad for keeping track of names places, event and caption information for the pictures you would take.

"Lightning at dusk over Tucson Arizona", 1983. This two to three minute time exposure of lightning also captured the silhouettes of two people watching a single cell thunderstorm at dusk over the Tucson Valley. Shot from a vantage point high in the Santa Catalina Mountain range. At the time this image was shot three copper smelters were in full production in the Southern Arizona desert and the microscopic dust particulates generated by copper production would create the brilliant orange sunsets experienced in Arizona at the time.

A.T. Willett Photographer in New York City!

While in New York not every job I did to survive was on top of the world, for a while I demonstrated Polaroid cameras at Bloomingdales."Can I take your picture with the New Polaroid Spectra System?"

Huricane Nora Rocky Point Mexico 1995

"With the development of the Internet much has changed in the business of selling images . We have decided to create a new way for our very best work to be available immediately to the people who buy our work! Direct from our cameras to the computer to your project.

First Lightning image made into an official postal stamp

The Stamp produced by the Royal Mail Society in 2000 left, and the original image shot on a Hasselblad 500 CM on Fuji Velvia, at an abandoned Missile Silo North of Tucson.

In March of 2000 after one of my images was used by the Royal Mail Society in England, The English version of the United States Post office, I came up with the idea for a series of stamps featuring severe weather as the subject. I wrote a proposal to the US stamp selection committee, a group of US citizens which sorts through 50,000 stamp proposals a year. Although this concept was not selected here is the pitch and the mocked up proposed stamps.

Update September 2004
Although the USPO Stamp selection committee said they did not take proposals, my idea was very interesting back in 2000 as you may have seen USPO series Cloudscapes (Fall 2004 Cloudscapes Stamp Series) they did copy my idea. Although I might ad, not as well, they even got a tornado on a stamp.