Early Warning

Here's something that might look a bit strange or even silly to someone who doesn't live in the American midwest. What you're looking at is a tornado siren, and it's not an uncommon sight around Oklahoma and many other parts of Tornado Alley though the exact shape and appearance of the sirens varies greatly depending on where you are: back home in Nebraska these sirens looked more like outsized bullhorns, but in Oklahoma they often resemble forty-foot-tall honey dippers. Most of the year these sirens stand watch, sentinels of the prairie ready to let loose a piercing wail if a twister threatens to close in on the community. This particular siren is a few blocks from my house and my wife and pass by it several times each week when we go out walking or biking with our kids, and I thought it would make for an interesting photographic exercise: how to capture the slightly surreal nature of this object with a 50mm lens?

When we went out on a recent walk I had no particular intention of tak