Lightning and Fine Art Come Together in Northern Colorado

Monday June 22nd, 2009, 9:30pm on a warm spring night, as the wife and I are enjoying a late evening dinner, I’m thinking to myself, huh, no storms tonight, that’s good I can certainly use a break. It seems like it’s been one storm after the other all spring long.

You see, once you’ve been bitten by the lightning and thunder storm bug it’s nearly impossible to let a storm go by without chasing after it. You simply can’t let one go by for fear the of missing the Big Photo Shot of your life. You know, the one that everyone says is the best of the best.

To me lightning is fine art, it’s nature’s light show, similar to a fireworks display. It’s always amazing, always different and seen without a camera it’s very quick, embedded in your mind for only a moment then gone forever.

However caught through the lens of a camera with the aid of some good lightning photography techniques you can capture mother natures fury for eternity. Now it can be studied and appreciated, now you get a second chance to enjoy the cloud to cloud, the cloud to ground or the ground to cloud lightning action and if you’re really lucky you might even see a ball of lightning…as a green glow of fire.

Then all of a sudden…out of nowhere…a flash of lightning followed by the crack of thunder…and again I’m being summoned by mother nature and one her incredible light shows, a lightning and thunder storm. It came in from the south, fast and furious. How many so far this year, I think to myself?  I spring to my feet and like a masked crusader or super hero, I cut my dinner short, I look at my wife and tell her… Gotta Go! She looks back at me and as always she says, “Please be careful, good luck… hope you get the big one.” I grab my gear and out the door I go heading straight for my trusty SUV and away we go.

Each storm is different and I have to tell you, this one was one of the scariest storms in my 20+ years of chasing storms. The flashes of lightning in the clouds are coming from all directions. It was like a war zone with flashes of light and loud booms all around you, like mortars going off. This storm really scared me and what scared me the most was you couldn’t tell where the bolts of lightning were going to strike next. Now that’s very scary and very dangerous.

I caught up with it in Longmont as it headed north along the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. I chased it all over Boulder County…through Berthoud….then Loveland….then Fort Collins all the while looking for the perfect shot.

For me photographing lightning is a fine art. It’s not just about getting an image of a Lightning strike… it’s about capturing it with something of interest in the photograph with it. At times I’m able to plan shots at different locations during a storm, if I’m really lucky it strikes where I’m hoping it will and I get the shot I was hoping for. Some of my planned shots have taken years to capture. I’ve returned home from a night of storm chasing many many times without a single image.

It was beginning to look like this would be one of those nights I’d already chased this storm through open space looking for something interesting to use as a backdrop or as a foreground with no luck at all. This storm was so amazing the likes of which I’ve rarely seen and I was able to stay with it as it seemed we were traveling at the same speed.

I was able to maintain a good distance just off the middle in the rain. So north we went….looking for a train, a barn, a mountain , anything… give me something. It seemed as if I was always in the wrong spot at the wrong time and when I did have a good object in sight the storm was not in the right position. I was just clearing a large residential area and was making my way back into wide open spaces again and then… there it was… The Anhauser Busch Budweiser Brewery, all lit up and just waiting to be captured in the middle of one of mother natures incredible light shows. By this time the storm was really going crazy. Flashes of lightning in all directions, storms such as this can be very exciting and very dangerous at the same time.

I managed to find a good location to park the SUV, set up my equipment and started shooting. As I’m shooting I’m also doing what I can to protect myself from being injured by the lightning, which of course isn’t much. After all I’m standing along side a metal tripod in wet weather photographing bolts of lightning less than  just a few miles away.

Lightning Fact: Most lightning strikes average 2 to 3 miles long and carry a current of 10,000 amps at 100 million volts. Not all lightning forms in the negatively charged area low in the thunderstorm cloud. Some lightning originates in the top of the thunderstorm, the area carrying a large positive charge. Lightning from this area is called positive lightning. Positive lightning is particularly dangerous, because it frequently strikes away from the rain core, either ahead or behind the thunderstorm. It can strike as far as 5 or 10 miles (8 or 16 kilometers) from the storm, in areas that most people do not consider to be a lightning-risk area.

So keeping this in mind, when I first started shooting I’d hit the shutter and sit in the back of the SUV with my feet off the ground. Really! Even rubber shoes don’t provide any meaningful protection in a lightning storm, so I’m quite sure my official storm chasing shoes, Colorado crocs, won’t either. As the storm raged on I’d hit the shutter and get back into the SUV away from the metal tripod, off the ground and with some safety of four rubber tires.  Eventually the storm became less threatening and I could begin to relax a bit and photograph normally.

The storm hung around long enough for me to get some great shots before heading off into Wyoming. I did chase it beyond the brewery for a ways but was never able find another location to get the shot I was looking for and it was time to call it a night anyway.

When it was all over it felt like waking up after a huge head rush wondering how far I’d traveled and where I was. The drive home was much longer than that of the exciting chase with the accompanying rush of adrenaline.

A copy of the photograph above now hangs inside the Budweiser brewery a reminder of the night she was caught in the middle of one of natures incredible light shows.