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3-22-07
Thunderstorms moved into the area later in the evening tonight and gave me a great opportunity to finally get some good shots. Once again the strike chart on my home page really didn't help me out much. I really need to find a different one that updates a little quicker than every hour. Anyway, I happened to peek out a window and saw a quick flash so I got together my stuff and headed down to the river.
The cloud structure was pretty neat too. At this point, lightning was pretty infrequent but there were some rain shafts I wanted to get in a shot.
The flashes became very frequent about 10 minutes later. This bolt was JUST out of the picture. I thought it was sort of neat how it lit the underside.
I panned the camera a bit to the left and BAM! It was such a quick, bright flash I really had no idea where it hit. It wasn't until I looked at it in the viewfinder after the exposure was over that I realized it was completely blown out. You can definitely see the upper part of the bolt in the reflection off the water.
After this I panned just a bit further to the left. This is definitely wasn't the best one of the night, but it was the only one I could catch.
Soon after this, the rain started to fall and I didn't want to risk damaging my equipment. I definitely didn't want to be done yet though considering it was only around 8:00. I figured I'd give Joel a call and see if he wanted to set out for some more. On the way out there I saw some incredible bolts on both sides of the road, very close to me. Electricity was very active alllll the way out there. Right about where I got to Hillsdale, I encountered some hail. This was actually quite an impressive little hail storm! The stones never got any bigger than pea size, but it was a true downpour. I slowed to around 30 mph. Visibility got very low for a while. I tried the best I could to try and get a shot of it, but this was the best I could come up with. It's pretty hard to do this while driving.
Soon as I get to Joel's, we set out. Right away we saw an impressive bolt right over a corn field. It was still raining at this point, so we decided to wait it out just a little bit more. Whoops. Sure enough, lightning activity came to a screeching halt. That was pretty disappointing. After about 45 minutes we completely gave up and I headed back home. Around midnight another small system came rolling through and brought some more. I went back down to the river and set back up, but rain was well out in front of any visible lightning. So, I took this shot and packed up, called it a night.
