Without a doubt my favourite weather to experience or just view is a thunderstorm, it is also my favourite thing to photograph is lightning.

Picture this: it’s the end of a long hot day and I don’t mean UK hot; I mean you are sweating from places you didn’t know you could sweat from kind of hot, that you can only experience in the tropics. There have been clouds building up in the distance but have been too far off for most of the day then you hear the rumbling in the distance. As the rumbling gets closer you are all at once hit by a breeze created by the outflow of the storm that not only drops the temperature bat also carries the sweet smell of rain with it. And that is when the show really begins.

 From an early age, I can remember watching thunderstorms out my bedroom window late at night. And after getting my hands on my first digital camera I was lucky enough to meet some storm chasers, one of whom is now my brother in law. And it was actually from the roof of the apartment block he lived at where I got my first photo of lighting.

 As you can see, it is not much but it is where I started from.

It was a difficult start as the camera I had was fairly basic and only had a maximum exposure time of 3 seconds and had no adaptor for an off camera trigger, meaning I had to hold the button down and hope that I could keep still enough. It was however a great way to cut my teeth.

As time went on, I got better, I went from overexposed images to something a bit more legible. I learnt from those in the storm chasing groups, I upgraded to a DSLR and in all this I got overconfident. This ended up with me nearly getting struck by lightning on one occasion and I got the photo to prove it.

 In the moments after this photo, I was the fastest man alive, I was back in my car before I could see clearly again, and I left my camera to fend for itself.

I love storm chasing and just being in a thunderstorm and it is something I sorely miss since leaving Australia, it is not just another bit of photography for me, in the past, I left jobs that I couldn’t work around storm chasing as stated in the previous post.