I’ve looked at photographs of lightning and thought about trying it sometime.  Today’s forecast called for late afternoon thunderstorms.  I figured the river would give me a good horizon to work with and often the storms seem to “come down the river”.    I got there ahead of the storms and sat tracking their progress via weather radar and lightning data on my smartphone.   The method I chose to try was to use a long exposure and hopefully capture a lightning strike during the exposure.  I used a variable neutral density filter set to minimize the light entering the lens, set the shutter speed for 30 sec and then adjusted the aperture to get a slightly underexposed image.   I had figured out how to set up my tripod with two legs between my seat and door … and the third leg extended across me and against the passenger seat.  Then I proceeded to shoot image after image.  There were several lightning strikes in different directions, but only one that was in the field of view up river that I’d selected.

It eventually began to rain enough that I couldn’t keep water from spotting the front of the lens, so I packed up to go.  I captured a photo of the view through my windshield after I dried off the camera.