How Hong Kong' s James Reynolds made chasing typhoons a career
The storm chaser, who films raging typhoons and volcanoes for a living, tells Martin Williams why he is drawn to Mother Nature at her most furious.
Most people in the area were sheltering indoors as Super Typhoon Dujuan slammed into northeast Taiwan late on September 28, but Hong Kong-based James Reynolds was in an alcove next to the railway station in Suao township, near the coast, filming as debris crashed by.
Just behind him, keeping an eye out for danger, was his friend Mark Thomas, who noticed metal roofing sheets smashing so hard into concrete that sparks flew. Branches were swept past as the wind roared, fierce rain squalls reduced visibility to less than four metres.
"Dujuan was in the top three strongest typhoons I've filmed," says Reynolds, which is saying something given that, at just 32, he's a veteran of "chasing" and filming typhoons. Although storm chasing is not unusual in the United States, Reynolds is a pioneer when it comes to hunting typhoons - the Pacific equivalent of hurricanes or cyclones - and Dujuan was his 51st.
In a decade of typhoon chasing, Reynolds has turned what began as a hobby into a business, appearing on global news reports and licensing footage for productions ranging from wild weather documentaries to screwball disaster movie Sharknado. Not content with heading to storms most people wish to avoid - including Haiyan, which killed more than 6,300 people in the Philippines two years ago - he has added volcanoes to his repertoire, filming as ash clouds race down slopes towards him or a quivering lava dome threatens to disintegrate and obliterate the surroundings, including Reynolds.
Gloucestershire, southern England - hardly a place for nature's extremes, though he remembers loving autumnal storms and "lying in bed listening to the wind and rain. It was a very comforting feeling".