On the evening of August 7th we had an intense thunderstorm come through southern Brevard county. Since it is a fairly rare event for us to get such an intense storm after sunset, I rushed to position my DSLR on a tripod on my house’s north-facing deck and took a series of wide-angle, long exposures. Two of the images are shown below. Both images were taken with my Olympus E-500 digital SLR fitted with a manual-focus 28mm f/3.5 Zuiko lens. (Click on the image to view the full-sized photo.)

The image above is a 25 second exposure at ISO 100 and f/8. It is fairly well focused and captures a primary cloud-to-ground strike and a secondary cloud-to-cloud strike.

The image above is a 20 second exposure at ISO 100 and f/3.5. Although this shot was not well focused (either the focus ring was not set to infinity or the tripod was blown around by the strong winds) and somewhat overexposed due to a wide open aperture, it captures a stunning, multi-branched, cloud-to-ground strike.