We were up in the Northampton area on Thursday just as a late day storm was threatening to broil through. We detoured into the meadows for a better look, (mostly) free of the clutter of man...
The whole day had been hot, sticky and humid. It was a proper and long awaited summer day, and the air was still thick with moisture at sunset...
The breezes began to pick up and turned into churning cross winds, running rampant over the meadows and wreaking havoc on the cloud cover. The approaching storm was passing close, just to the south of us...
The sun was by now dropping just enough to begin casting it's reddish glow, and we decided to brave the nearing storm and commit to sticking around for the last rays...
At about this time I was staked out in the middle of a broad section of the field, with an aluminum monopod propping up the camera. Then some occasional lightning bolts began to crack across the clouds directly overhead. I gawked open mouthed at the show above, until after about the fourth bolt or so, a tiny smidgen of self-preservation sparked with the realization that the monopod out there in the wide open would probably make a darn near perfect lightning rod. I made a bee-line back to the car.
The main part of the storm ended up passing just to the south, but the wait had paid off. At one point, at the same time, we were treated to the glowing sunset to the western horizon...
...the beginnings of a rainbow to the eastern...
...and to top it off, literally, those occasional lightning bolts crackling from cloud to cloud directly overhead, with more of them to the south...
It was nearly a trifecta, weather-wise...
Good thing we gambled...
2 comments:
the first photo is awesome, how the clouds mimic the tree silhouette, it's my desktop background now.
that was a pretty serendipitous angle for that photo...(love using that word...)
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