Creator Spotlight with Storm Chaser & Photographer Dan Robinson
This week, we’re pleased to introduce you to former professional storm chaser and photographer, Dan Robinson. Dan has been in the industry for over 33 years, where he has seen “190 tornadoes and covered seven hurricanes and tropical storms, including Category 5 Hurricane Michael.” His YouTube channel has garnered over 218k subscribers. After reading his spotlight blog, check out his post on “How the crime of copyright infringement took $1 million from me and shut down my operation.”
What was the inspiration behind becoming a creator? What do you enjoy most about the creative process?
My inspiration for taking a camera out to shoot a storm for the first time in 1993 came from a book by renowned lightning researcher Dr. Martin Uman at the University of Florida. I was immediately hooked, and my passion for documenting these amazing displays of nature grew steadily over the following decade.
Storms are simply awe-inspiring, and it is a joy to capture rare and dramatic imagery of them so that others could experience a little bit of what I was seeing.
Can you talk through your creative process? How long does it take? Does everything you produce make money?
Most of my preparation comes in the form of forecasting. I don’t have a degree or any formal training. I had to acquire a working knowledge of meteorology for the best chance of being in the right place at the right time to get “the shot.” Conventional weather forecasts don’t give a chaser all of the information needed to reach that goal, so there are many aspects I had to learn how to do myself. Building that knowledge has taken my entire career, and I’m still learning today.
I heavily outfitted all of my past and current vehicles to accommodate my equipment, data and logistical needs: power, computers, internet access, satellite receiver, tools, and even a full twin bed.
A chase can be anything from a simple 1-mile jaunt down the road to a series of a thousand mile, all day expeditions across the country. On average, one out of every ten to fifteen chases results in a capture that makes a profit. Most of my income comes from a “big catch” that I manage to get three to five times in an average year.
What do you think is the biggest misconception about your line of work?
Many have a misconception that I have a “death wish” or want to be reckless. Storms do pose a risk, but my goal isn’t the danger, it’s to capture as much of the natural phenomena and its effects possible while staying safe. The biggest risk in storm chasing actually comes from driving on the highways.
When did you first become aware of copyright, and why?
I encountered the first infringement of my work (that I knew about) while driving through North Carolina in 1998. A local radio station had taken one of my lightning photographs to advertise their weather coverage on billboards along the interstate.
Have you experienced copyright infringement and, if so, how has it affected you personally and financially?
Infringement, or at least my awareness of how much it was happening, steadily increased throughout my career. It was only occasional infringements of photographs I was finding in my first 15 years of operation. But it was the advent of video sharing sites in the late 2000s where I began to see an explosion in the number and frequency of infringements.
Most of my revenue prior to the rise of social media and streaming video in the 2010s was from my role as a freelance cameraman shooting for conventional broadcast and cable television. During that era, I saw occasional, mostly low-impact infringements on TV. But as more of my revenue shifted into the online world, infringements quickly grew from a nuisance to a significant threat to my income. Finding stolen copies and filing DMCA takedowns became a major part of my workload.
The fight was long, difficult, and eventually futile. The platforms would not give me access to automated scanning tools like Content ID and Rights Manager, so I was only able to find handfuls of videos using manual searches. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of infringing copies of my videos were diverting over seven figures of my income to the social media platforms and any monetized accounts uploading them. I only became aware of the full scale of it when I finally was able to get my work ingested in an agency’s content scanning tools.
The platforms not only made searching for infringing copies impossible, but they often stalled or simply stopped responding to DMCA takedowns. Stolen videos would stay up for months, getting tens of millions of views while my YouTube originals faltered. Many infringers would send false counter-notifications, which the platforms would honor.
In 2025, despite a tremendous amount of effort battling the problem, the impact of the diverted income was too much to overcome. I simply no longer had enough revenue to cover my operating costs. I made the final revenue chase of my career on September 21, 2025.
Copyright infringement was the sole reason I had to end my career as a professional cameraman and storm chaser. My videos continue to be wildly successful to this day, but 95% of the revenue they are generating is going to the social media companies and any monetized accounts uploading the videos.
I enlisted the help of a good rights management agency and attorney, in the hopes that the legal system can recover enough of the lost income that I can get back to doing what I love. But that could take years, and may not work out in the end. In the meantime, I’ve been forced to shift all of my time and effort into developing an IT career.
What do you do when you encounter someone stealing something you’ve invested your intellect, time, and money into?
Today, I send all of those cases to my agents and attorney. They are better equipped to handle them and get better results than I was on my own.
What is the best piece of advice that you would give other creators in your field about copyright and how to protect themselves?
Register your work with the US Copyright Office so you will have the full force of the law behind you. Sign on with a good rights management agency and law firm to help you find and take down infringements.
It also helps to tell your story. A troubling percentage of the public doesn’t understand the issue at all. They tend to side with infringers and vilify any creators who enforce their copyright. If more creators shared the impact these infringements had, I believe that awareness would help spur support for needed changes to our currently-inadequate DMCA takedown laws.
What is your biggest copyright-related challenge?
The overwhelming amount of infringing re-uploads of my videos to social media and video sharing sites has been and continues to be my biggest problem.
How has AI technology impacted your works and career?
It’s too soon to discern the full impact from AI, but traffic to my 30-year old website has been on a rapid decline since the advent of search engine AI summaries.
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