First attempt at lightning

For a while now, I've been wanting to try doing star trails.  Star trails involve doing long exposures during the night while the earth rotates and makes long, bright streaks.  It also requires being in the middle of nowhere and camping out with your camera while it does it's multi-hour thing.

I wasn't too keen on trying it by myself and getting murdered in my sleep, but when I found out that someone I knew was also interested in giving it a whirl and the new moon was coming up, we decided to go give it a whirl together.

You'd think that in the desert, there wouldn't be much problem with the weather.  Alas, there was a storm coming through.  The weather report only predicted rain from about 7-8 pm, and since things often clear up fast here in Utah we were still hopeful for clear skies by midnight.

When we got in the car, however, there had not yet been any rain.  The cloud cover was thick, and as we drove toward our destination it only got worse and began to rain lightly.  Pretty soon we saw brilliant flashes of lightning.

This was no one-hour storm.

We were already out in the middle of nowhere, so now what?  Try to wait it out?  The chances of it easing up were slim.  How about photograph the lightning?  Sure!

So here are a couple of pictures from an impromptu lightning shoot.  They're nothing spectacular - we hadn't chosen the location ahead of time or made any preparations for this particular shoot.  It was more an experiment than anything.