First Storm of the Season

Posted Wed, June 17, 2009 - 1:30 AM
photography, minnesota, weather

This has been a dry spring and early summer, as we all know. But this evening around 9:30 PM a line of thunderstorms formed over southern Dakota county and then trained for about an hour and a half. I saw the lightning to the south on the way back home and headed over to the bluff at Linwood Park with the camera. It turned out to be a great view, and more and more people started to arrive and watch the show.

A lightning show

Click through for the rest of the photos.

I've never tried to photograph lightning before, and it provided a new challenge. You have to find a balance between an exposure that's long enough to capture something happening, but short enough to prevent multiple exposures of a moving cloud deck. Nature's own (very unpredictable) flash bulb, you could say.

So often, the photos ended up less crisp than I would have liked. To get really "pro" looking shots, I'd need to use one of those special attachments to detect a leader and then fire a short exposure right as the primary return stroke hits.

The back end of the storm cell was very clearly defined, with a clear sky behind. I stood chatting with a couple of other people, as the lightning inside the cloud made for some interesting effects against the cauliflower-like puffs and billows.

Edge of the storm, with Vega

A lonely bolt at the edge of the storm

This one reminds me of the images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Instead of turbulent clouds of gas and dust of varying density lit up by stars, it's a turbulent cloud of water droplets of varying density lit up by electric discharges. Another example of the amazing uniformity of the natural world.