There is so much going on here! At first, in the viewfinder, this shot irritated me a bit, because the cloud-to-ground stroke at right appeared uncomfortably overexposed, and I didn’t pay much attention to the brief cloud-to-air filament (failed step leader from the same discharge) in the middle, nor to the rainbow. Yet the rainbow was fleeting and fortunate to capture—less than half a minute in duration, of that magenta-heavy coloration we see in rainbows right before sunset, and was nowhere nearly this intense in other photos. Meanwhile, the big, bright CG was fuzzy-edged because it occurred almost completely buried inside a narrow but dense rain core. The core diffused the lightning’s edges and spread the light far beyond the channel itself, except at the bottom, where a small gap still appeared between heaviest rain and ground. Meanwhile, shafts and filaments of rain gave the dark mountainsides a smoky, airbrushed appearance—all beyond the colorful landscape of a desert orchard on one side of the road, and wild brush on the other. All in all, the atmosphere granted me a wonderful painting in the form of a photograph, and I’m most thankful. The spectacle was far from finished, too.
5 E Dragoon AZ (17 Jul 19) Looking S
32.0336, -109.9455Painted Sky over Dragoon, Arizona
There is so much going on here! At first, in the viewfinder, this shot irritated me a bit, because the cloud-to-ground stroke at right appeared uncomfortably overexposed, and I didn’t pay much attention to the brief cloud-to-air filament (failed step leader from the same discharge) in the middle, nor to the rainbow. Yet the rainbow was fleeting and fortunate to capture—less than half a minute in duration, of that magenta-heavy coloration we see in rainbows right before sunset, and was nowhere nearly this intense in other photos. Meanwhile, the big, bright CG was fuzzy-edged because it occurred almost completely buried inside a narrow but dense rain core. The core diffused the lightning’s edges and spread the light far beyond the channel itself, except at the bottom, where a small gap still appeared between heaviest rain and ground. Meanwhile, shafts and filaments of rain gave the dark mountainsides a smoky, airbrushed appearance—all beyond the colorful landscape of a desert orchard on one side of the road, and wild brush on the other. All in all, the atmosphere granted me a wonderful painting in the form of a photograph, and I’m most thankful. The spectacle was far from finished, too.
5 E Dragoon AZ (17 Jul 19) Looking S
32.0336, -109.9455