Yes, that kind of storm is called a derecho, their caused by very hot air in the atmosphere that comes down and produces a wall of sustained, high speed(60 miles an hour or more), straight line wind, instead of just gusts. their like sand storms without the sand. real nasty. very ominous pic here.

Wow that looks like a scene from a horror movie. We had a storm just like that with winds reaching upwards of 60mph here in Mississippi on the same day...weird.

An Absolutely Beautiful Picture ...

Booth would be proud ...

Incredible...almost doesn't look real.

What a beautiful part of the world I must visit there someday ...

Great photo, I know some people don't like HDR, but I think it works well here, especially with the cloud front, and the buildings. Are you able to tell us any technical information about the shot itself, ie f-stop, ISO? I see some noise and some colour fringes, and I'm curious if that was because of camera settings, or because of the HDR post-processing. Did you shoot the lens at it's widest? Keep up the good work...

Love it!

... and I love playing around in Google Earth. :)

http://bizlur.com/upload/chicago.jpg

great picture

Thanks for all the nice comments. It was an incredible storm - I think there were gusts of 80mph! As for technical info:

ISO: set to low since I was using a tripod
Focal Length: 11
F-stop: 4.5
Exposure: 1/80, 1/50, 1/30 (bracket mode)

I originally tried post-processing in Photomatix, but decided to try out CS5's new HDR Pro tool. I agree there are some grainy parts, but after spending hours trying to reduce the noise without loosing any details in the clouds and buildings, I decided to leave it as-is.

I'm very new to HDR, so any tips would be greatly appreciated!

oh now THIS is cool! Nice shot!

Amazing..very ominous and beautiful photo proudly adorning my desktop right now....