Lightning and the Elephant

Lightning bursts over Elephant Rock at night in Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada.

Details: Valley of Fire, northeast of Las Vegas, Nevada, is one of the neatest State Parks I’ve ever been to–it’s chock full of red sandstone formations and arches like aptly named Elephant Rock seen here. I came to this spot hoping for some good Milky Way shots, but an unexpected evening storm made an even more amazing backdrop for this cool scene. This image took nearly an hour of patient shooting of long exposures to get the dramatic bolt seen here. Because the night was pitch black in-between strikes, I used a technique called “light painting” to capture the detail of the rock formation–it’s a manual process and tedious when you’re taking dozens of long-exposure shots, but in this case it was well worth it!

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