Jack's Christmas Message

Hello, and welcome to Jack Fawsitt Photography blog. This post is an update to let you know about a new focus for Jack Fawsitt Photography and what it will mean for my posts.

The main take away from this change, is that I am now focusing on producing more videos. I have thinking about doing this for several weeks now, and I thought since the new year is only a week away, this would be a good time for me to make the switch to making videos.

To make something clear, I am not going to stop taking photos for Jack Fawsitt Photography. I will continue to post at least one photo per day onto Instagram, and I will still make photography an important part of this model. Me making videos is just another project for me.

The new videos will be about living in Miami, and what the culture and life of the city is like. As many of you will probably know by now, I am a British expat living in Miami, so this will add a special twist to the videos.

Although there is no schedule for the videos, I will try to upload regularly about various topics from the mundane to the down right interesting. The videos will be uploaded to my YouTube Channel: Jack Fawsitt Films, as well as on IGTV.

I hope to get the first video produced and released before the end of 2018, ready for a videocentric 2019.

Thank you for reading this, and I hope you have had a Merry Christmas and I hope you will have a Happy New Year 2019!

- Jack Fawsitt Photography -

A follow up to Hurricane Michael

When I last posted about Hurricane Michael yesterday, the storm was a Category 3 hurricane with winds of 125 mph (~ 200 km/h). However, today the storm has grown ferociously strong, becoming the deadliest storm to ever impact the Florida Panhandle region.

As I write this, Michael is expected to hit the Panhandle of Florida at any moment, and this storm has wickedly fast winds of 150 mph (~ 240 km/h), making Michael a dangerous Category 4 hurricane, and winds that were not predicted to occur at all, are rapidly becoming a reality. To put the wind speed into perspective, 150 mph is around the speed that aeroplanes need to take off from the ground, so that gives an idea of how fast the winds are howling around Michael.

I hope the very best for the people living in the Florida Panhandle who are riding out the storm today.

Here is my previous post talking about Hurricane Michael and me.

Hurricane Michael and me

Welcome to this post from Jack Fawsitt Photography,

Some of you reading this may be concerned about the fact that recently, Hurricane Michael has formed in the Caribbean and is posing a threat to Florida. This blog post is to clear up any ambiguities regarding me and the storm.

Basically to put a long story short, I am fine. Hurricane Michael is not tracked to head towards Miami or any part of South Florida. Instead, the storm is tracked to make landfall over North Florida, possibly even hitting the coastal town of Panama City, FL. My heart goes out to those people who will very shortly begin to feel the wrath of Michael, as the Category 3 storm edges ever closer to the coast of Florida for a hit possibly as early as tomorrow.

However, the storm's impact will be felt much further than North Florida. Storm surge warnings have been issued as far south as the Tampa Bay area, and the neighbouring states of Alabama and even Louisiana. After the storm impacts Florida, it is expected to turn to the north, and impact most of the Deep South region of the United States. This includes but not limited to: Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. Michael will then leave the US completely and head out over the open waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

If you were worried about me, then worry no more, since Hurricane Michael is not heading for South Florida. In fact, as I write this, the storm which is capable of 120 mph (~ 200 km/h) winds is over 400 miles (~650 km) to the west of Miami. Therefore, this city will not feel any impact of Hurricane Michael. I am now hoping that no future hurricanes hit the city from the 2018 hurricane season.

Thank you for reading this post from Jack Fawsitt Photography.

UPDATE: 10/10/2018: Hurricane Michael is now ravaging the coast of Northern Florida as a Category 4 hurricane. A follow up post is linked here.

An image of Hurricane Michael on 9 October 2018. Image property of NASA, who released the image into the Public Domain.

Hurricane Irma occurred 1 year ago today

One year ago today, I was inside one of the hurricanes to impact the United States of America during the 2017 Hurricane Season. Hurricane Irma struck the Florida Keys and then moved along Florida’s west coast, impacting the Tampa Bay Area and the Orlando area for example. However, there was another area that Irma impacted, and that was the South Florida metropolitan area. And this is where I tell my story about surviving a hurricane.

The saga of Hurricane Irma began in late August 2017, when a disturbance formed across the Eastern Atlantic Ocean. Few realised how quickly Irma would form from this disturbance into the extremely large system that she became. In less than 24 hours, Irma was upgraded from a Tropical Storm to a Category 3 hurricane, one of the quickest transformations in recorded history.

By the time that Hurricane Irma began impacting the Lesser Antilles, I was already making preparations for a direct hit on the South Florida metro area, since many models were suggesting that Irma would make a direct hit on Miami Beach. I prepared by stocking up on supplies to last a few days, such as non-perishable foods, bottles of water, and candles so that there would be light in the event that the electricity went out. At this moment, I felt terrified that the homie that I lived in would be no more by the end of the week, and I had visions of the house being completely destroyed, just like what happened a few weeks earlier with Hurricane Harvey in Texas.

Once the storm passed near the Turks and Caicos Islands, the odds of a hit on Miami Beach dropped dramatically, and I felt a slight sigh of relief. However, I did not let my guard down and kept my preparations for Irma”s arrival on the Sunday (10 September 2017). By Friday, the last of the preparations were completed: the window shutters were closed, and anything loose was brought inside the house, such as tables and chairs in the garden. Once that was done, I hunkered down and prepared for the worst.

On the Saturday, the wind and rain began, getting progressively stronger as Irma headed towards the coasts of Cuba as a dangerous Category 5 storm. The weather forecast explained that Irma was supposed to turn towards the North, however it was unknown when she was expected to turn towards Florida until the last minute. She turned North over Northern Cuba as a Category 4 system and moved slowly towards the Florida Keys. On Sunday morning, Irma made landfall on Cudjoe Key, just outside the town of Key West. Fortunately, almost all of the Key residents were evacuated onto the mainland before Irma’s arrival, and what was left after Irma’s wake was complete destruction.

Meanwhile in the metro area, conditions deteriorated until at around 11:30, most of South Florida was knocked out of power. This was the most scariest part of the hurricane, realising that there was no electricity for millions of residents of South Florida. It was at this point that some strange things began to happen. I could never forget the water in the toilet bowl moving around and being sucked inside the pipes when the winds were howling outside. My mum could never forget the doors bending and bowing in the extreme winds. It felt like the door was going to give way at any minute. Thankfully, the door never gave way.

When the sun set, it was an eerie sight to see South Florida so dark, where once was a busy night time scene, now desolate and empty. This was also the worst time of the hurricane experience, knowing that there was a dangerous system outside, sleep was not going to happen that night.

The next day brought a massive relief, although the winds were still strong, the skies brightened up and even more thankfully, the damage here was minimal. The fence blew down, and some roof tiles were damaged. Apart from that though, very little structural damage occurred in South Florida, the damage was mainly vegetation and some street sign damage. The same could not have been said though for the Florida Keys, which even now at the time of recording, some areas are still uninhabitable from Hiurricane Irma 1 year ago.

Life got back together relatively quickly, storm damage was cleaned up within a matter of days for the major thoroughfares, but took until November for the minor roads to be cleaned up. The electricity grid was mostly fixed within the week after the storm hit Florida. Life was beginning to return to normal, however Florida would never be the same again. What once was a feeling of invincibility turned into vulnerability after Hurricane Irma impacted almost the entire state of Florida, as well as numerous other Caribbean islands. The main take away from this is that I was extremely grateful that no major damage occurred from the storm, when it could have been a whole lot worse for many more people, especially where the storm impacted in the Florida Keys,

I have not posted here in ages

Hello everyone and welcome back to this post from the blog of Jack Fawsitt Photography.

I cannot believe that it has been over 2 months since I posted last on this blog. This was because I could not really find the time between posting on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to update this blog much.

Anyway, I would like to congratulate you all for me reaching 100 followers on Instagram! Thank you to everyone who is following me so far on my Instagram page. If you would like to follow me, click the link here.

I will probably post some more items here in the future. For now though, thank you for reading this blog post from Jack Fawsitt Photography.

The 2018 Hurricane Season has unofficially started

And so it’s happened.

Yesterday, I wrote a post saying that there was a strong possibility that the first storm of the season: Tropical Storm Alberto, would form in the coming days. Well, at around 10:30 today (25/05/2018), Subtropical Storm Alberto has officially formed according to the National Hurricane Center of the United States.

The current storm track is for Alberto to make landfall on the Gulf Coast of the US, possibly the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama or the area of the Florida Panhandle. The wind speeds could be up to 60 mph (96 km/h) when the storm hits land at some point over the next few days.

Fortunately for South Florida, Alberto is not expected to hit the area, but heavy rains and torrential downpours are expected to hit the metro area over the weekend and possibly Monday and Tuesday as well.

As always, if there are any updates about Alberto, then I will place them into a separate post on this blog.

Could the first tropical storm of 2018 be about to form?

Welcome back to my blog and in this post, I want to talk about the almost certain possibility that the first tropical storm of the year will form by this weekend.

Currently, there is an organised disturbance near Belize and Cuba that is headed for the Florida Panhandle. It could hit anywhere from New Orleans, Louisiana to Key West, Florida in the United States. Even if a tropical storm does not form (which is unlikely now considering the fact that it has at least a 70% chance of formation as of writing), it will still dump a lot of rain to South Florida. Over 6" of rain could fall by the end of this week, which is a stark contrast to the drought-filled winter of 2017/18 that South Florida received.

If this storm does form, it is likely that it will not be very powerful, and may not even reach Category 1 status, due to the fact that the sea has not warmed up enough and therefore has minimal energy to form. Still, hurricanes can form even before the official start of hurricane season on June 1st. The name for the storm, should it form, will be Tropical Storm Alberto.

Also in other news, I have decided to change the name of my Twitter from 'jackfawsittpix' to simply 'jackfpix' for two reasons. One, the new name is a lot simpler to type out, and two, this can correlate well with my Facebook page, which I have also named 'jackfpix'.

Thank you for reading this post, and if there are any more updates, then I will either post them below this sentence, or create a brand new post with the additional information.

The start of another rainy season

Hello and welcome to this blog!

As some of you may know, the rainy season started on May 15 of this year. I hope that this rainy season is not as bad as last season (2017), although if the last week has anything to say, the rainy season may be quite bad, due to the amount of rain that South Florida has had.

This year's rainy season will end on October 15, 2018.

Spring is here!

Hello and welcome back to this blog. I apologise for being away so long - writing up blog posts on an iPad Mini obviously was not the best experience I have ever had. But I am at least back for now, and spring is finally here! Well, in saying that, it has always been here, I mean - it is South Florida, so what do you expect? Snow everywhere? No. The same weather every day really - hot, very hot and extremely hot!

Anyway, whilst I was totally not complaining about the heat here in Florida, I wanted to say that you may have seen my Instagram change a little bit for 2018. Now, I am trying to post at least 1 photo per day on my Instagram page, preferably 2. These photos will come from my most recent experiences or come from the archives. I have photos that stretch back as far as 2008, when I was a young boy in the UK.

Speaking of Instagram, there is an entire page about that on my blog which you can find here. Basically, my Instagram bio is limited to 150 characters, but I want to say more than that on my Instagram, so the full bio, plus more information can be found on this page.

I have also made some slight changes to the site layout in the past few days, just wanted to let you know.

Anyway, thank you for reading. and I will be posting soon to this blog when I do updates about Jack Fawsitt Photography.

New Year - New Design

Welcome back to Jack Fawsitt Photography. I hope you have had a Happy New Year 2018, and I am here to tell about some changes to this blog.

In the near future, I will be redesigning this blog with a new theme to reflect a new year, so standby for some changes in the coming days.