Sunday morning I was awakened at 3:30 AM by loud crashes of thunder. Looking out the window I could see bright streaks of lightning streaking across the sky. For those of you who live in areas of the country where thunderstorms are common this is probably not a big deal. For residents of the San Francisco Bay Area this is a rare sight. I jumped out of bed, ran to my office and started tossing camera gear into a bag. As I was rolling out of the driveway, I was hoping I had brought everything I was going to need.
I started driving around my neighborhood looking for a good location from which to photograph the storm. I soon realized the storm was heading north and decided to get on the freeway to chase the lightning. I ended up at the Palo Alto Baylands Nature Preserve just as the sunrise was beginning. Grabbing my camera bag and tripod I dashed off down the trail to the top of a nearby knoll.
The sky at this time was a fiery red in color filled with dark dramatic clouds. I quickly set up my camera and tripod and began shooting. I have a lightning trigger but decided that I did not want to chance missing the sunrise trying to get it set up. I started shooting with 2 second exposures, set the camera in the continuous drive mode and fired off a series of shots with the remote release locked hoping to catch a lightning strike. I was rewarded almost immediately with the featured image above. I continued shooting as the sky changed from fiery red to golden and captured a lighting strike above Mission Peak in Fremont just as the sun was rising above the hills.
