Idaho Electrical Storm

Something we don't get in Ridgecrest very often is lightning.  But while in Idaho, we had some spectacular electrical shows in the sky courtesy of mother nature.  It is just amazing to watch.

Before the lightning came, the skies were a blanket of grey storm clouds.



Then the world started to collapse on itself like black hole.  It quickly got straightened out before anything bad happened.



After it got dark, I attempted to capture some of the electrical show on the camera.  It wasn't easy, because by the time I saw a lightning bolt and click to snap a picture, it was already gone.  I started by randomly clicking the shutter and hoping to get some bolts by chance.  It actually worked!  However, I had a lot of black pictures to delete and it was time consuming.  Then I searched the camera's special features to see if there was a lightning mode or some other mode that could help me get some pictures of the bolts.  The only thing I could  find that seemed useful was a mode that takes 5 pictures per second while you hold down the button.  That also worked, but the  pictures didn't turn out as well.  In the end I ended up with some 1500+ pictures, with only about 25 of those 1500 that actually had something cool in them.  It didn't take as long as you might think to delete the bad ones.

Here are some of the results:

[caption id="attachment_544" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="The same lightning bolt 200 milliseconds apart"][/caption]

And here are some other cool shots: