Furious Skies

I had a little fun tonight. I got home from work, turned on the tv and fell asleep instantly. I really didn't mean to, but I'm glad I did. I didn't wake up until a bit after 10, and by that time a bunch of piddly garden variety storms were firing all around me. My main focus of the night was a pretty decent line moving through central/eastern Iowa. I went after the little cells just to pass the time until the line got here. As it turned out, the little guys ended up being my best shots of the night.

Yep, "Save for Web" function in Photoshop up to its dirty tricks again. This image quality once again looks pretty atrocious, but it definitely saves space. These few small cells were off to my north a ways. I'm actually surprised that bolt hit so close. They weren't popping out of that storm at all until now.

By the way, I'm back out on Sand Road once again. That road is a pretty sweet place to shoot from, since it's flat almost 360°.

I wish I was panned just a tad to the left here to get that bolt coming out of the side of the tower. I was reall debating on all of these pics too. I wanted to slap the zoom lens on to try and get in on some of these strikes, but I also wanted to get the tops and the stars. These turned out good, but I wish I would have done both now.

As the action pushed away further and further to the north, I turned the camera off and sat for a while, waiting to see if I'd get lucky and get a new storm to pop somewhere close. I got lucky. As I kept watching to the north, a few flashes lit up the sky to my south. Another small cell had apparently just started dropping cg's like crazy. MAN I wish I would have had the camera pointed that way earlier. There were some very nice looking bolts before I started shooting. There are some hot pixels in here too. I guess I'm too lazy to get them out of there.

One of my all-time favorite lightning shots. Again, that "Save for Web" function really degrades the quality here. I should probably do something about that instead of whining about it on every post. This was my first ever picture on Flickr to ever make the "Explore" section. That was pretty cool.

And like that the action stopped. Mother Nature likes to throw those switches.

It was about 4:00 a.m. now and since I was now in some pretty heavy rain, I called it quits. My Verizon card all of a sudden isn't working so I didn't bother bringing my laptop with. I ran home to see where that line was and it was just about here. So, down to the docks once again. I go there quite a bit, and the pics are starting to get a bit redundant, but it's pretty convenient for me since it's about 1/2 a block away. There were constant flashes, but the only cg's I saw were WAAAYY upriver. I really didn't mind at this point since I thought I would get some really good ones over the river.

Cloud to air. Not very impressive as this, but I'll take it for now.

It was getting pretty close now and I still didn't see a single cg. I was getting pretty "worried" about now. I didn't want this to be a lightning "bust". If nothing else, I knew I had a shelf coming, whether it be photo-worthy or not.

No such luck. Crappy looking shelf, ZERO cloud to ground strikes. Oh well. I got my good shot earlier in the night anyway. That purple is lightning lighting up the rain curtains.

Some not-so-interesting pics with morning twilight starting to appear. It was now 5:15 a.m. and I still wasn't that tired.

About this time I was getting pretty irritated. There were actually a few cg's here just over that treeline, but every time it would do it, I was wiping the rain off the lens and missed them. I finally got fed up and called it a "night". Or would that be morning.