I made a round-trip road trip from Northern California to Biloxi, Mississippi in May/June 1995. What better time to experience the wrath of early summer thunderstorms! On the way back home on July 1, 1995 I made a stop at the Amarillo, Texas airport to see some stored airliners. While I was there an amazing thunderstorm ripped through the area. While I was parked at AMA I took a few snapshots of lightning strikes.
I made the image below the evening of July 30th, 2011 from my backyard. We were having a pretty nice monsoon light show so I set up the camera.
Hundreds of digital exposures netted me 4 with lightning and the one below I like the best of those.
Summertime in Arizona brings monsoon weather and much of our annual rainfall. Thunderstorms are fairly frequent and provide for some awesome lightning displays...day and night. I've witnessed some doosies in my years here and on the afternoon of August 24, 2010 I ventured out in the late afternoon to try and catch at least one photograph of lightning for this list.
I drove out of town a few miles to get into a clear area south of a westbound storm cell. I parked so I could take photos out of my driver side window. The lightning was quite frequent but I just couldn't time the photos correctly. I used up quite a bit of a 4GB flash card (about a thousand shots worth) before reformatting it to start over. I decided to change locations as well, so I drove across the street. After firing off several hundred shots I managed to catch a fairly nice single bolt.
After getting this shot I decided to head further north and try a different location. I didn't get into much rain, although rain was falling heavily in some areas. Up by Morristown I decided to park and get some shots to the south. The sun was getting close to setting and there was a fairly prominent rainbow (and a very faint second rainbow) so I figured I'd try and get a shot of the rainbow with some lightning. While the lightning was fairly regular and quite impressive, I didn't get the "money" shot I was hoping for. After reviewing my photos at home, I did find a couple shots with some small cloud-to-cloud lightning bolts so those are presented below.
