The storm chaser in me really does wish that there were a farm out that that grew lightning strikes, but in the meantime I guess I will have to settle with lightning striking a farm :-)

This image was from my recent storm chasing trip to Arizona and is actually from the same location as this one from a recent blog post.

Today’s blog post takes us back a couple years to July 4th, 2011, one day before the now famous haboob hit the metro Phoenix area.  This dust storm was in the Casa Grande, AZ area and pretty much died out before it could get to the Phoenix area, by most scales it was quite small, and while it might look very large in this image it was just that I was VERY close to it when I grabbed this shot.

This shot was actually a single still image out of a sequence I captured for a time lapse video that evening.  This was back in the time that I was still shooting JPG for time lapse due to card size limitations.  If you look closely at the image you might see a good amount of JPG artifacts from the processing that I needed to do to the JPG file to get it to look close to the way I wanted the final image to present.

Typically I share these older images as #WayBackMachine posts, but since this is a previously unshared image I am simply classifying it as “Vintage.” :-)

Today’s blog post takes up back to my recent storm chasing trip in Arizona.  I titled this image, and the post “Field Lightning” for the simple reason that I was in a field, it is of a field and the lightning came in in the field, pretty creative isn’t it.? :-)

I really debated whether or not I was going to share this image or not, there are a few things about this image that I really love, the fact that it was shortly after sunset meant that there was still just a little bit of color in the sky to add interest, and I also loved having those huge field sprinklers in the shot to show that I was in an agricultural area of town.  The one thing I am not really happy with is how blown out the lightning strike was.  I had been shooting lightning for about 15 minute prior to this image, all of which were quite a ways away from me and the exposure was dialed in pretty well for those.  This strike was MUCH closer than any of the ones I had shot prior to this one and that lead to this one being over exposed.  I was able to recover the shot and got this, which is still an image that I am happy with.

If you are curious as to how I recover lightning images that are overexposed and blown out, I have a tutorial online, please check it out.