Meet the photographer behind the viral green sky storm photo

By the end of last week, Jaden Miller was ready for a little less activity on her phone — and a little less attention on her viral storm snapshot that made international news.

“I’m honestly pretty exhausted by it,” she said. “I’m on social media all day for work, and I have notifications turned off on my phone now, but every time I look at my phone, it’s so many. I don’t know how people who are actually famous deal with this.”

Miller’s brush with fame started as last week’s derecho rolled into Sioux Falls. A marketing manager at Weller Brothers Landscaping, she and her co-workers were told to head home as weather warnings cautioned severe storms were ahead.

“So that’s why I was home early,” she said. “It was just rolling in.”

From her condo in the Jones421 Building downtown, she and her husband, Reece Chambers, have an exceptional view of landmarks, including the Old Courthouse Museum and St. Joseph Cathedral.

“We were just watching it from the living room, and it started turning more and more green. I don’t even know how to describe it. It was just kind of strange,” she said.

So she stepped onto her patio, began taking photos with her phone and then reached for her camera.

Photo by Jaden Miller

“I thought this was actually really cool and it deserves my real camera, so I grabbed that.”

Miller isn’t an amateur at this. A 2014 University of Sioux Falls graduate in media studies and journalism, she originally thought about becoming a newspaper reporter and interned at South Dakota Public Radio. She was drawn to video at USF and spent the early part of her career as a wedding photographer, along with working for the Sioux Falls nonprofit AsOne Ministries.

She spent time in Africa, chronicling the stories of people in Rwanda and Uganda as a way to connect and communicate the nonprofit’s mission.

Photo by Reece Chambers

She returned to Sioux Falls with an interest in pursuing marketing, which led her to spend nearly five years at 9 Clouds before taking on her current role late last year.

So she’d experienced enough to know a story worth sharing when she saw one, which is why she posted her storm photos to her Twitter account, tagged some news outlets and watched it take off.

“I thought for sure it would be shared around around Sioux Falls … but I did not think this would happen,” she said. “But it’s gone so far. I had a newspaper in Russia reach out. Someone sent me a screenshot of it in a newspaper in India. It was on the “Today” show. Who knows at this point.”

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Photo by Jaden Miller

Most “reputable news sources” have identified her as the photographer, she said.

She also has been amused by other creators on the internet turning her work into the backdrop for everything from a UFO landing to Wizard of Oz-inspired edits.

But as for her own foray into future viral content? Don’t count on it.

“I’ve gotten quite a bit of new Twitter followers from this,” she said. “And they are going to be so sorely disappointed.”