Scott Wood Photoblog

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If you have been following me this summer either through any of the social media I use or though this blog, you know that I really like getting other elements of interest into my lightning images.  When it isn’t monsoon, I am always “scouting” out places and keeping a mental database of places that I think will make for an interesting shot when the storms do return each year.

This image was made at the Chandler Municipal Airport in Chandler, AZ last night.  I have had my eye on this location since the time we moved to Chandler and I have even setup at this location a couple different times when the conditions seemed good, but last night was the first time that I actually got the image that I thought would be there.

There is a real chance that this might be the “last hurrah” for the 2011 Arizona monsoon season, and while I hope it isn’t, if this is the last lightning image I capture this season, I feel that I will have ended it on a very high note.

I hope  you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed capturing it.

(please click on the image for a larger version or to order prints)

A couple years ago I started recording an occasional Audio Boo while out capturing storm images.  Even though I don’t think that very many people actually listen to them, I enjoy doing them and I also enjoy going back and listening to some of the early ones to see where my thoughts were at the time.  During this past Friday night’s epic lightning display, I was recording one of those Audio Boos when I captured this image.  The cool thing about this is that you can actually hear the thunder from this very strike in that Boo.  After all the years that I have been shooting lightning, this is the first time that I have been able to share not only the image of the strike, my reaction to capturing it and the sound of the thunder.

I am embedding that Audio Boo into this post, but if you have any trouble playing it there is also a link to it over to the right of this post. :-)

(please click on the image to see a larger version or to order prints)

I have already posted a couple images from the storms that rolled though the Phoenix area on Friday night, but this one is a little different.  My buddy Bryan Snider posted Sunset Storm from the same night.  I would like you to follow the link to that image and take a good look at Bryan’s image.  Look closely, it is the exact same strike as in this image, just taken from a different place and at a different angle, I am quite a bit south and much closer to the strike than Bryan was.  If you look closely at Bryan’s image, you will see some golden tones in the strike, but you will also see the setting sun off to the right.  I was luck in my image that the lightning was pretty much between me and that setting sun, giving my capture the golden hue that we see so often in those breathtaking Arizona sunsets.

In what seems like a lot of years of capturing lightning, going well back into my film days, this is the first strike that I have captured where everything lined up perfectly to get those golden hues into the strike.  During this storm, strikes that were hitting either to the north or south of this one were the “normal” white color, but this one was right where it needed to be.  I have been getting pretty lucky this summer with getting lightning right where I want it to be.  Perhaps I did something to please Jupiter. :-)

This image is pretty much “out of camera,” as most of my lightning images have been this year, with the exception of white balance correcting it to have the clouds be gray and not blueish/purplish which I tend to not like in lightning imagery.

I hope you enjoy it.  I always welcome blog comments, and please make sure that you spend some time over on Bryan’s blog as well.  While we have a different approach, and thus different styles of lightning images, I really enjoy his work and hope that you do too.

(please click on the image to see a larger version or to order prints)

This is one of those “planned” lightning shots.  Granted my planning didn’t start until a few minutes before I captured it, but when I got to this location, which you should be able to figure out where it is from the image itself, I saw these signs and the lightning was striking in the “right” general area, so I decided to try and get this shot.

I have posted already this year about how I believe that you need other elements in a good lightning image to make it more interesting.  When I saw these signs, I knew that they were just what I was looking for, as the lightning that was striking to the east of me was not really all that pretty on it’s own.  My problem was that the signs had no light on them so it was time to do a bit of light painting.  In this image, I used the LED on the back of my IPhone to provide the light needed to illuminate the signs.  I could have went to my truck and got a strobe, but that would have been overkill and I would have spent so much time getting the exposure right that I would most likely have missed any chance at getting the shot.  Many times simpler truly is better.

I hope you enjoy it, and there is more from last nights storm to come.