View allAll Photos Tagged lightningbolt
I had a great lightning photo with no landscape and a wheat field photo with no decent sky. No sense in letting a good lightning photo go to waste. Did my first composite and while it isn't great, it made for a great learning experience.
Beaver County Oklahoma USA
A lightning strike or lightning bolt is a lightning event in which the electric discharge takes place between the atmosphere and the ground. Most originate in a cumulonimbus cloud and terminate on the ground, called cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning. A less common type of strike, ground-to-cloud (GC) lightning, is upward-propagating lightning initiated from a tall grounded object and reaching into the clouds. About 25% of all lightning events worldwide are strikes between the atmosphere and earth-bound objects. Most are intracloud (IC) lightning and cloud-to-cloud (CC), where discharges only occur high in the atmosphere. Lightning strikes the average commercial aircraft at least once a year, but modern engineering and design means this is rarely a problem. The movement of aircraft through clouds can even cause lightning strikes.
A single lightning event is a "flash", which is a complex, multistage process, some parts of which are not fully understood. Most CG flashes only "strike" one physical location, referred to as a "termination". The primary conducting channel, the bright, coursing light that may be seen and is called a "strike", is only about one inch (ca. 2.5 cm) in diameter, but because of its extreme brilliance, it often looks much larger to the human eye and in photographs. Lightning discharges are typically miles long, but certain types of horizontal discharges can be tens of miles in length. The entire flash lasts only a fraction of a second.
sunday night my home town had a rare night full of thunderstorms. after sunset i could see the flashes over the ocean from my house, so i headed down to the beach to photograph. i got there at 815 pm and I got home at 5am. during that time the lightning was nonstop. there were multiple cells blowing through. i could see them from a distance and i would watch them move closer until they were just off shore, then watch them as they moved on up north, while another storm was coming up from the south. when i got home at 5 am the lightning was still going strong.
in this image Anacapa Island, of the Channel Islands National Park, can be seen.
I didn’t think I was going to make it in time to capture this rare event. I had driven from Glacier National Park in two days. I got home the night before with an empty tank of fuel. My wife woke me up at 3 am and I got in my truck and headed towards SF. Every gas station was either closed or the power was out. 45 minutes later I got fuel. I ended up just going to a lookout in Belmont and shot the city from 22 miles away. Not what I had hoped for, but wanted to capture the lightning before it ended. Usually these things only last a couple of hours at best, but this was unprecedented! I’m so stoked on all the incredible images I have been seeing! The Bay Area has amazing photographers! Props to all of you! I have some pretty good shot at sunrise and beyond looking to the East. I had my lightning trigger which allowed me to get some cool shots after the sun came up. More to come.
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The spring of 2023 brought much needed rains to our area. We were in a severe drought, and we were so thankful for the abundant moisture. The rains slowed down my photography trips as the roads were a muddy mess for a long period of time. When the storms would come in, I would go with my husband to watch. He is a fire chief and storm spotter. When I am with him, I don't get the best compositions because it is more important for him to be able to see the storm, so I settle for whatever I can get.
Beaver County Oklahoma
The rainy season will soon be over in Jo'burg, but for now we're still getting those typical late afternoon, early evening thunderstorms
© 2020 John McKeen. All Rights Reserved.
This image is an original work and may not be reproduced without the permission of the photographer/artist. It is not available for use on websites, blogs or other media without explicit written permission and may not be downloaded or altered in any way
Back from 10 days of storm chasing in the central plains. An unusual heatwave made things challenging, but we still managed to find some storms to chase.
A nighttime lightning display lights up the sky and clouds near Newcastle, Wyoming. This is a single 30 second exposure.
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Had been out watching the storm with my fire chief husband when the fire pagers went off. It's been super dry here. With lightning like this, wasn't shocking to have 3 different lightning strike fires in the county.
Oklahoma Panhandle
I love a good thunderstorm and photographing lightning is my favorite thing to shoot. It's a love/hate thing because most of the time, my timing is off. But I love the challenge of trying to capture it. Just set the timer and then watch the magic happen. Whether I capture something fantastic or miss it all, I still love the storm.
Beaver County Oklahoma
Tonight we drove out to get ice cream and saw a huge thunderhead starting to form. When we left, the lightning was starting put on an amazing show. We don't get lightning like this where I live, so I was having the time of my life watching it come to life. We decided to go to a local hospital parking garage to get a better view of the cloud. I kept clicking away hoping that I would capture a few lightning bolts. This was the best of the bunch. What a great way to end the day.
Date night with my husband! Storm spotting is part of being fire chief and part of being fire chief's wife is "helping". Does proving what we see count as helping? He's my spotter and the calm to my storm when the lightning doesn't happen in the direction I am aimed.
Beaver County Oklahoma
Old Railtrack disappearing into the distance under a supercell thunderstorm lit up by the setting sun. Colorado.
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A slow moving storm came through producing lots of opportunities for lightning shots. Of course, bad timing on my part made me miss the best shots .... it's almost a given that will happen Every .... Single .... Time!!! But I can't complain about what I did get.
Beaver County Oklahoma
I have a question for any experts out there. Anyone with knowledge of lightning and atmospherics, and also anyone with working knowledge of camera sensors.
I took these two shots yesterday, more in hope than anything, Being lucky enough to have the Sony RX10 that shoots at 24 frames per second, I pointed at the sky across the street and held the shutter for a second. I got lucky and managed these two shots. Not very exciting looking, being daylight lightning shots, but I am intrigued by the difference in the two shots. They are consecutive frames 1/24th of a second apart. Bolt 1 shows up the brightest, and actually shows the lightning in its ground to air phase and the bolt is only half completed. Lightning bolt 2 shows the completed bolt all the way to the cloud, but is fading in brightness. The bolt itself was very close with barely a second elapsing between flash and the window rattling thunderclap!
My puzzle is the first shot that shows a purple halo around the upward end of the lightning, and a corresponding colour shift across the image in the sky below the top of the lightning.
I'd love to know is this just an issue with the sensor and its response to a sudden intense flash, or is it atmospheric?
My guess is the sensor, but I'd love to hear other opinions or experiences.
These two shots are both cropped heavily from the left half of the wide angle image, hence the slight distortion in the vertical lines of the house.
Lightning over the west of Johannesburg
© 2020 John McKeen. All Rights Reserved.
This image is an original work and may not be reproduced without the permission of the photographer/artist. It is not available for use on websites, blogs or other media without explicit written permission and may not be downloaded or altered in any way
Had to take the drone up before the line of storms rolled in.
Last night (June 26) was epic when it came to thunderstorms, vivd frequent lightning. Non-stop from 8pm until past 12am in my area
These two flares have been burning for weeks and have created quite a stir in our area. They glow bright at night. Our area has had more than our fair share of wildfires so the glow makes people nervous. This lightning storm just happened to be happening in the same area as the flares. I won't say this is my best photo but it one for the memories.
Beaver County Oklahoma
March 19, 2022 - Cold front line of minor storms with some wind and brief vivid lightning roll through Philly suburbs. *As long as these don't cause damage, power outages, I'm fine with this. :)
The tail end of a heavy thunderstorm that rolled over the City of Marquette and out into Lake Superior.
August 15th, 2010
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This Arcus cloud on the front edge of a supercell storm is also known as the Whales Mouth, I took this shot in Minnesota a few years back, the speed and size of the storm were amazing which made it difficult to get a shot like this.
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All images are copyright © John Finney Photography.
Don't use without permission.
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A stunning stormy sunset with lightning, taken on the Nebraska/Kansas border near the town of Superior.
Available as wall art here....
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All images are copyright © John Finney Photography.
Don't use without permission.
Please contact me here before using any of my images for any reason. Thank you.
After chasing a tornadic supercell in the Haskell-Trockmorton-New Castle area we ended up in our motel in Jacksboro, TX.
Here, the storm still produced dangerously close CG lightning as can be seen in the photograph. My greatest fear was that the powerlines, which were close to our location, would be hit by lightning....
Photographed with Fujichrome Sensia 100 ISO slide film.