I confess it - I am a storm-chaser wanna-be.
Well, actually, at a strictly local level, I am a storm-chaser, or as some people might say, I'm a nutbar.
Seriously, how many people do you know who will stand on a hill or on the side of a highway with a camera and tripod, with clouds approaching spitting out those bursts of high-voltage electricity we know as lightning?
Just the night before I wrote this, I was doing that very thing, recording lightning strikes just south of the city, and if I do say so, I got some pretty awesome lightning bolts forking out of the clouds.
While taking those photos, there were at least two (and probably more that I didn't see) lightning bolts that looked very, very close, although there was a delay in the thunder. With the two I'm thinking of, the bolts were very bright and well-defined, then they seemed to break up like shattered glass. At least, to my wide eyes they appeared to do this. I was hoping to get a photo of a bolt like this, but then, it's a time exposure and not a video.
You may be wondering what the fascination is; all I can say is, I find active thunderstorms very exciting visually, as well as in audio terms. It's not that I want to put myself in danger's way, but it is very cool to see what millions of volts of pure electricity do when they zap out of a cloud down to the ground, and I love the challenge on a photographic level to get good, sharp dramatic photos of the lightning.
Some nights I go out and it just doesn't work out; what looks like a great storm turns out to be nothing. One recent night, there was a storm approaching with some really cool lightning. I went and set up my camera and nothing. I stood there watching the clouds float by, and do you think a single lightning bolt emerged? No, not a one.
My dream is to visit this place in Venezuela where there is lightning every night, literally regular like clockwork. It's over a lake, which is very cool, and it's so incredible the native language describes it as a "river of fire in the sky". The locals set up lawn chairs and sit back and watch the show at the same time every night. I have got to see that!
The one weird aspect of my storm-watching is, I have never seen a funnel cloud or tornado. It's not that I necessarily want to - but if one appears, say out in the country over some empty pasture land or something, I'd like to see it.
Weather being unpredictable, however, it wouldn't happen that way - so, I'll stick to lightning bolts. They're cool, and they're free to see.
