June 2, 2009 - Lightning

I kept my eye on the radar, watching the storm come closer and closer. I went out on our front porch and heard the thunder off in the distance. The first flashes of distant lightning were appearing in the sky. I got my camera ready, setting it up so that I could just hold the shutter button down and have it take picture after picture. I set up my tripod on the porch stairs, and watched. I sat there for about 20 minutes taking pictures of the dark sky, for it was not only cloudy, but also about 9:30 at night. I got this distant flash of light in the clouds, but that wasn't quite what I wanted.

As the storm got closer, I realized I wasn't in the most ideal location for getting the pictures I wanted: there were too many trees. So I moved over to a different side of the porch where there was a shot of more open sky. There I set up my camera and tripod and began snapping pictures like crazy.

A little while after I had started taking pictures from this location, I got a teeny bit of what I was after. In some ways I couldn't believe my eyes: I had finally gotten a lighting picture! But I was determined to keep at it and see about getting a better one. The following pictures reveal what I ended up with.

In short, these photos were simply awesome for me. The thunder was really loud, particularly that last one, but I was thrilled and thankful. After that last lighting bolt I went inside, with over 600 photographs on my camera, though all but 6 were totally dark. It was such a neat experience. I love thunderstorms, but I never thought I'd actually capture a bolt of lightning. Normally they happen so fast you can't really see them, but when you capture them you can see how intricate they are. If you click on the third bolt pictured above, you'll see bunches of little electric strands coming off the main bolt. It's so neat. And so loud!

And so ended that day of photography. I had really enjoyed it and was very thankful for the pictures that God had given to me! But that was the end of that amazing evening. So now I bet you're thinking: "Hey! You said there would be five posts for June 2, 2009. What about the fifth one?" Well, that post has pictures from June 2, even though I put them together later. If that doesn't make any sense to you, hopefully you'll understand it better when the next post comes.