Many of us witnessed the amazing spectacle Wednesday night with the lightning show that lit up the sky. I never knew Auburn to be a place that attracted lightning, and to my understanding it was rare to see as many strikes as we all did. The last time I remember trying to capture multiple lightning strikes was when I lived in Reno, Nevada with my Canon AE-1 manual film camera. Those days you kept your fingers crossed hoping you got the exposure right. Today us photographers are spoiled by seeing the image right away and adjusting the exposure before the next shot. Even then, it’s not fool-proof.

Photographing lightning is very difficult simply because it’s often at night and you don’t know where or when the next strike will happen. You basically focus, aim and fire. But with Wednesday’s show, it was a little easier because there was so much going on. When I noticed the sky above my house blowing up like a strobe light, I had to get out there and get some photos. I figured the best way was to get up high enough to get a clear, unobstructed view of the horizon. The parking lot behind In-N-Out Burger made for a good spot to post up. This particular storm had a tremendous downpour as well, which also added to the difficulty of the shoot. Surprisingly, after the rain stopped the lightning still continued and turned into a great night.

Using a tri-pod I set my camera exposures some at 20 seconds, and some at 15 seconds, but kept my f-stop at 22. After that it’s all about luck. Most of my shots ended up with just sky and no streaks of lightning. Of course a lot of my attempts ended with the shutter closing right before a perfect streak cracked across the sky. On others I got lucky and managed to get some decent photos. The photo, which we chose to run front page, looked good on the screen, but in print not so much. The content on page A2 seem to bleed through causing the headline and part of the photo to be seen within the lightning photo. Oh well. I thought the photo that ran on the jump page turned out great. You can see more storm photos in our gallery at auburnjournal.com.

There is one photo in particular that I saw which blew my mind. My Auburn user canyonhiker captured an awesome photo. In case you’re reading this canyonhiker, I give you props on getting such an amazing photo.