Finally, Lightning!

I'm a video-first storm guy who only sometimes pretends to be a photographer and snap well-composed photos. That makes my love for lightning photography tricky. Living in the Midwest I only get a handful of opportunities for really good lightning photos, and I often fumble my way through these once in a lifetime shots by being wholly unfamiliar with my gear.

Severe storms blew up in multiple rounds across central Illinois on August 16th. I had plans with the family through daylight hours, but when the sun went down a new cluster of storms erupted to my north about 30 or 40 miles. This felt kind of perfect. The storms would drift slowly south toward me and ideally run me over here in Champaign County.

I found a reliable country road east of Urbana and drove north, stopping at a T in the road a few miles south of the county line. The northern horizon was electric and this intersection seemed quiet, like there shouldn't be many cars bugging me with their headlights coming and going.

Like I do, I mostly fumbled through the night but was saved by a couple underhand tosses from Mother Nature.

The front side of the storms were honestly kind of a disappointment from a photo stand point... lots of flashing, a pretty neat shelf cloud, but no bolts. All of the lightning seemed tucked back in the rain. I shoot and shoot for 90 minutes before my camera battery dies. Digging around the car I can't find a spare battery and with the storm approaching I mostly give up. I start packing up and preparing to drive back home before I climb into the back and dig around in my bin and pull out my trusty old power inverter, wire that up with my charger and put my camera battery on it.

The storm had overtaken me at this point so I drove a few miles south letting the battery charge before stopping, getting the partially charged battery and putting it back in my camera, setting my camera up on my window mount and face it into the wind and rain and the storm blessed me with a bolt of lightning center of my frame right up the road from where I'd come from.

The storm really began to blow up right overhead and I quickly found myself in pouring rain and winds gusting 40-50 mph so I drove back home for good. "For good".

I unpacked my gear and got into the house and let the dog out, and as I'm standing in the backyard with the dog I see the most insane anvil crawler lightning arcing overhead. Ah man. I grabbed only my DSLR and my window mount and got back in the car, drove south of Urbana, and began shooting.

At some point while I was shooting I bumped my window clamp camera mount and something within it snapped so it wouldn't hold tight anymore, so now I've got to get out into the rain with my tripod and get setup for real.

An underhand toss from the sky, one of the most incredible bolts of lightning I've ever seen. This is super wide, 10 mm taking up basically the entire eastern sky.