Web icon Derek Powazek, who we last mentioned around this time last year surrounding the closure of his controversial Pixish site, has returned to his magazine roots (see: JPG Magazine), albeit briefly. Following the massive dust storm in Sydney Australia a few days back, Powazek was like many of us who started seeing dozens of photos of the odd city-enveloping storm pop up on every blog and in every tweet. But whereas the lot of us clicked away, he was compelled to do something with the perhaps once-in-a-lifetime happening and dediced to put together a publication using all of these photos he was seeing. After getting permission from nearly every one of the photographers responsible for all those photos the world was seeing, he quickly designed Strange Light: Photos from the Great Australian Dust Storm and ran it through Hewlett-Packard's MagCloud self-publishing venture. All of this within 48 hours. Here's a bit about why:

Why would a Web guy like Powazek slave over an old-fashioned paper product? "Magazines are my happy place," he says. "I think print and the Internet complement each other more than people realize." Certainly, there's something about once-in-a-lifetime occurrences that cry out for print. It's as if holding something tangible is a more satisfying way to process and mark big events than bookmarking a page.