The southwestern monsoon is underway, and last night I was able to successfully capture some lightning shots with digital. I had tried a couple of times previously, but didn’t have any luck…mostly because of storm location. I’m sure there will be some color and clarity differences between lightning on film versus being shot with digital…but I really love instantaneously seeing my results instead of waiting a week for film to get processed and scanned to a digital format. This first image below is my favorite. I composed the frame looking east with my recently installed annemometer in the foreground. From the 7 to 8 second lag in thunder, I assume this strike was about a mile and a half east of me (and the annemometer), but coincidentally the strike appears to have danced around the annemometer.
Below is the same shot as above, except with a much tighter crop, so you can see the erratic looping path of the lightning channel.
Below is another shot looking east that I thought was a “keeper”.
I also had about three other “keepers” that I shot from inside the garage. It was raining pretty steadily, and I couldn’t get out to a more favorable location…so you can see the inside wall of the garage on the right side of the following three pics. You’ll also notice that the street light to the lower left was also intermittently turning off due to the brightness of the lightning flashes.
