Numerous lightning flashes punctuated the sky in the middle to far distance on this eventful evening, most of which illuminated some cloud material or thin shafts of anvil precip between us and the main storm core. I probably shot two dozen slides of those strikes, mostly of dissatisfying quality due to either distance, or the lack of any evidence of foreground, given the utter dearth of artificial light or flash-silhouetted landscape features to set a frame of reference. Somehow a lot of the lightning only lit up itself, and it didn’t help that I had to set exposure to the discharge channels and not the far-dimmer light of the barely illuminated (if at all) landscape. The ground only is evident indirectly in the abrupt bottom of the flash, and the cloud base only inferentially by its apparently narrowed, faded top. The horizontal channel connected very erratically to the main CG fades as it wriggles in and out of cloud material going leftward. The entire visible part of the flash seems to be orphaned in space, alone in a great black void, a brilliant abstraction with no definite connection visible to anything in particular. And so, here it is, one of the stranger lightning images in this gallery, as well a one of the oldest.
3 SW Lockett TX (23 Apr 89) Looking SW
34.0699, -99.4103