I drove a up to Boulder, Col. the other day to photograph President Barack Obama address an auditorium of college kids on the issue of student loan interest rate hikes in July if Congress allows the rates to reset, which would double interest rates to 6.8% and impact over 7 million students. While it was a long, 12-hour day for about 45 minutes worth of shooting, I had a blast. In addition to this being my first time photographing Mr. President, I had the opportunity to wander around my new stomping grounds at the edge of the Rockies, meet an assortment of local photographers and have my camera gear sniffed by some well-trained dogs. I can’t even get my dog to shake. Crazy.

I got an assignment to photograph the reopening of the Smallwood Store, a historic landmark and trading post that’s been catering to the residents of Chokoloskee for over one hundred years. Chokoloskee is a small island and fishing village in the Ten Thousand Islands off the coast of southwest Florida. It’s history is steeped in long periods of stillness with intense punctuations of lawlessness and vigilantism.

In 1910 several dozen men from Chokoloskee shot dead fellow resident Edgar Watson as he moored his boat ashore. Watson was a mass murderer who lived a life of contradiction: he payed his bills, went to church, ran a business and killed 57 men. Peter Matthiessen wrote a book about it: Killing Mister Watson. It’s a must read.

In the 1970s and 1980s Chokoloskee and Everglades City, another fishing hamlet just three miles up the road, became drop off points for inbound loads of marijuana and cocaine from South America bound for Miami. As the fishing economy dried up, many of the men who navigated the porous coastline of the Ten Thousand Islands turned to running drugs across the state on airboats. It is said that 80% of the towns’ men went to prison for drug running.

Now Chokoloskee is a sleepy village that swells in the winter with snowbirds escaping the cold up north. And the Smallwood Store, despite a six-month closure after a developer severed public access by fencing off the one and only road leading to the historic landmark, has reopened following a court order to remove the fence and restore the road. My editor’s instructions read: “Be there early and meet the Smallwoods. Nice people. I’m going to ‘share’ the location via iPhone. It’s basically at the end of the earth.”

A few weeks ago I stood on Bonita Beach and photographed a storm rolling in off the Gulf of Mexico. The sky turned a deep, cobalt blue. Vertical flashes of lightning tinseled the horizon. Strong gusts punctuated the already steady east wind, whipping up whitecaps and suspending the seagulls in place.

Despite the dramatic weather’s immanent approach, there was little reaction from the crowd on the beach. People splashed in the water. Jet skiers played “follow-the-leader” several hundred yards offshore. A few sunbathers begrudgingly started to corral their belongings. A look at the radar map on my phone indicated I had some time before the storm would hit.

More than a century ago, meteorologist Isaac Cline stood on the beaches of Galveston, Texas, and tried to make sense of the ominous conditions that would lead to the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history – the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. In Galveston alone, more than 8,000 people died.

Dr. James Elsner, a professor of geography at Florida State University and expert on weather, climate, hurricanes and hurricane hazards, says due to the communication barriers and limited technology, “there was no way to see where the storms were headed.”

Elsner said over the course of a few days, cable communication between weather stations along the coast, as well as messages from Havana, Cuba, would enable the meteorologists at the turn of the 20th century to put together a weather map.

“But with a large storm, you wouldn’t know where it was headed, only where it had been,” Elsner said. “You wouldn’t know if it was headed for Texas or Tampa, only that it was out there somewhere.”

In his book “Isaac’s Storm,” author Erik Larson points out meteorologists at the time also faced public scrutiny. Many people thought there was no way to predict the weather. Weather was God’s will, they thought, and you could not forecast God’s will.

Now, with radar, satellite imagery, reconnaissance aircraft and numerical computations, meteorologists can tell where a storm is, what it’s doing, and most likely, where it’s heading.

But Elsner said there’s still a lot scientists who don’t understand about hurricanes and major weather events, such as predicting storm intensity.

“The intensity is really related to the individual thunderstorms within the hurricane,” Elsner said, adding that the complexity and fluidity of a storm system and its interaction with land take forecasting beyond the boundaries of basic Newtonian physics.

Elsner’s colleague at Florida State, Dr. Jay Baker, studies psychological and behavioral patterns of hurricane perception, response and evacuation. Baker said today there is so much confidence in the precision of hurricane forecasting that, given the dynamic nature of an approaching hurricane, people pay too much attention to the “skinny black line” that indicates the storm’s most likely path, and too little attention to the “error cone,” which indicates other likely paths.

Despite the heightened understanding of weather and advancements in science and technology, weather equaling “God’s will” is not necessarily a thing of the past.

In 1996, Taliban forces in Afghanistan stormed the Afghanistan Meteorological Authority’s office in Kabul and destroyed more than 100 years of weather records and instruments. Their reasoning: weather forecasting is sorcery. Last year Rev. Pat Robertson claimed God created a blizzard on the eastern seaboard of the United States “to punish Americans who were planning to drive to do something gay.” Last week Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann drew criticism after saying: “I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’”

A Bachmann spokesman later said that Bachmann made the statement in jest.

So speaking of jest, I’ll leave you with a forecast from the late, great George Carlin: “Weather forecast for tonight: dark. Continued dark overnight, with widely scattered light by morning.”