Okay, not really a find, because I remembered they were there and had this idle intention of doing something with them, but since I was sorting the recent images tonight, I decided I might as well tackle it.
Back on August 23rd, we had sporadic and scattered thundercells cruising across the state in the early morning, and I got very little warning of one that may pass right over us, so I scampered over to the neighborhood pond to set up. Initial flashes and rumbling looked promising, but the activity pretty much died out as the cell drew close. I had a ton of frames, all time exposures waiting for a decent strike, and only got two frames that showed anything at all. Well, except for the cloud movement. And in flipping through them, I realized I could do something with those at least.
It may be obvious that this is running backwards, but I couldn’t start with the one lightning flash now, could I? And that was the way it went: after changing position, I got one noticeable burst and then nothing for plenty of frames, but the glow from the streetlights off of the low clouds made them visible, and the sequence of frames (there are ten here) made their development clear. You will also notice another shift in there, because I changed angle slightly and apparently the focal length too, though this was unintentional, and I only did a half-ass job of correcting it for the gif (pronounced, “JOB-smakt.”) Actually, I’m only keeping the one frame and discarding the others, so this is the only use they’ll ever be put to. If you want to consider this an NFT, I’ll be happy to launder wisely invest your money for you.
You may want a better look at that one frame – or you may not, in which case, close your eyes because it’s coming anyway.
Actually, I’m not really sure why I’m even keeping this one, except that it shows the different layers of clouds. Woo hoo.
Meanwhile, as I was typing this, my internet connection got balky, so I paused for a bit and chased another project, the result being that I added almost a hundred frames to the Sort folder before I was even done with this sort. You’ll see some of them soon – I was a bit more successful for this project, and no, it’s not lightning.