Water-Bound Tornado
One night while my wife and I were having dinner I noticed a strange cloud formation out over the lake that we live on near Orlando, FL. Every summer the local news will show footage of a water spout at the beach and inform the viewer that a water spout is a tornado that forms over a body of water.
Having seen many of these news stories in the past I instantly knew what it was I was looking at outside of our window and I quickly grabbed my Panasonic TZ3. I wasn′t alone in identifying the water spout as my neighbors were outside watching it as well.
Turning the TZ3 on and changing the Mode dial to the motion picture setting I composed the picture utilizing the camera′s large LCD monitor on the back of the camera. Pressing the zoom lever to telephoto it allowed me to zoom in to capture the spout touching the lake. I was able to pan up and show the storm up to the clouds.
After capturing different angles of the storm I was able to download the video clips to my laptop and edit them together in about 10 minutes using Apple′s iMovie software. After editing a few clips together I instructed iMovie to output the file as a web clip which was then emailed to the local ABC affiliate WFTV in Orlando.
Channel 9 used the clip during the intro to its 11 o′clock news cast highlighting their lead stories. I was pretty impressed that while the TZ3′s video is not High Definition it is usable even for broadcast.
