I've always been fascinated by bad weather. Even as a little kid in California, I can remember sitting by the window during storms, waiting to see lightning. It's a rare thing in the San Francisco Bay Area; I'd be sitting there for half an hour sometimes, just looking
So when I found myself moving out to the East Coast, I was looking forward to being in a place where lightning is fairly common in the summer. Through all my time in Vermont, I'd go running to the window (or outside) if I heard thunder crack.
Now here in Pennsylvania, and armed with a camera, I do the same, except I bring my gear with me. One evening I was sitting at home, checking the weather, and noticed a nice band of red on the radar heading straight my way. "Great!" I thought. "Perfect opportunity to get a lightning shot!"
So I went out storm-chasing, heading up to a spot on a hill with a view of the valley in which Scranton sits. I set my camera up and started shooting, 30 seconds at a time. The lightning was distant and often faint, but I kept waiting for the storm to come my way.
Probably something more than half an hour later, the weather data on my smartphone confirmed that the nice band of red had somehow broken up and gone straight around Scranton, so this is the only lightning shot I got.
The photo wound up being more about the clouds and the colors than the lightning, the lightning being an important but relatively minor element in the photo. The composition is unusual by DPC standards It's weird enough that I thought it might work for a free study. Or maybe that's backwards.
Thanks to DPL teammates noraneko, scalvert, and nshapiro for providing feedback and suggestions that led to improvements in the processing.
I struggled for a full week with the title for this one, and I'm still not so sure about it, but ya gotta go with something.
Hoping for a 6+, as ever.
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Oohh, My favourite subject. Nice with colour in teh sky and the bursting cloud. Lightning seems a bit soft but great never the less. I wonder what some nice foreground would have done to this. Still something different just with the sky
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