The air was hot and thick as I set up my camera at the foot of a turnrow somewhere north of Lake Bruin. It was hot enough to bring on a full sweat even though I was standing motionless in the dusty, rutted path. Mosquitoes filled the air, but in the distance, lighting rioted across the sky, strobes behind the clouds that made ramparts out of the rushing thunderheads. The lightning storm was at least fifteen miles off and no rain fell on the cotton fields I was positioned among. It was a great show.
But, rather than wax descriptive about the weather I’ll just say that it was spectacular, if you could forget about the bugs. For those interested in the photographic details, I primarily used a Canon EF 28mm f/1.8 USM but also got a few shots with my Canon EF 35mm f/1.4 L USM. It took a while for the lenses and camera body (a 5D MKII) to warm up and cease fogging, but once it was all situated, I took 30 second exposures at ISO 800 (with long exposure noise reduction enabled). The lenses were initially set at f/8 but I dropped the aperture to f/5.6 in order to gather more ambient light from the half moon. The whole set-up was trigger by an AOE Lightning Strike II. The shots were taken RAW then processed through Aperture, Nik Color Efex Pro 4 and Nik Dfine 2 to remove the noise.
