gregschmidt

Lightning Over Lewiston

On June 1, 2015, I received an alert that there was a massive thunderstorm moving in. At the time, I lived in Lewiston, Idaho, USA, which is nestled right at th...
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On June 1, 2015, I received an alert that there was a massive thunderstorm moving in. At the time, I lived in Lewiston, Idaho, USA, which is nestled right at the base of the Snake River canyon. So, with a flurry of excitement, I gathered up my camera gear, and set out up the nearby hill, in hopes of catching the lightning.

This was my first time ever trying to actively chase-capture lightning, and I had waited in the same spot on that hill for over 5 hours, as storm after storm rolled through. I watched the transition from evening to dusk, and into night. Finally, around 10:00pm, my efforts and patience paid off, and I was rewarded with this 10-second exposure of an aerial strike over the town.

The white line near the bottom is a car driving up the hill during those 10 seconds, and the hue of orange on the left side is a patch of rain falling over the local paper mill, reflecting the factory lights in the raindrops. Ironically, the spot where the lightning starts to come out of the clouds, dips down and then goes back up is about where my apartment was that I was living in at the time.
I absolutely love the way the light and energy from the lightning lights up the cloud, and really shows off the detail of the clouds!

This is one of my crown jewels of my photo collection. One, because it is a first for me in lightning photography, and second, because I actually had a local resident try to plagiarize it, and I had the "thrill" of fighting for it and defending intellectual property rights for the first time. It has been published in a local power companies newsletter, as well as another companies calendar that produces power relays around the world.
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