Lightning in St. George, UtahLast night (or rather, very early this morning, Wednesday morning) a thunderstorm rolled through St. George. The booming thunder woke me up. I grabbed my digital camera and tried to figure out how to set the shutter speed to a super-slow setting so I could try to capture some of the lightning displays going on above. I was clueless, and had to quickly download the camera's instruction manual before I knew how to do it.

So there I was at 3:00 AM, sitting on my porch with my camera, sitting directly on the concrete, using the sole plastic chair there as a make-shift tripod to stabilize the camera for some 10-15 second exposures. I pointed, clicked, pointed, clicked, on and on, capturing a large number of totally black pictures. Once or twice I got lucky.

My very first lightning pictures! No, the image included in this post is nothing astounding, but it's one of my very first.

Ecstatic, I came back inside while the storm continued westward towards Hurricane where my parents reside (where, they tell me, it wakened them as well).

Lighning is as beautiful as it is dangerous. I can understand Benjamin Franklin's fascination.