Storm Print – Cathedral of Light

I love to photograph lightning storms at night but this was a dream come true. It was the icing on the cake, the cherry on top of what had already been a very fulfilling and thrilling storm chase day.
As we pulled into the gas station, a phalanx of thunderclouds lining the highway began to spark into life. Bursts of light rippled through the clouds like something out of an 80s Spielberg movie. I craned my neck upwards to the updraft directly above and I could see tongues of lightning darting out into the clear air from the very tops of the cloud. Clear air bolts like these are something I'd never seen before in 15 years of chasing.
We hurriedly gassing up and chased the storm out of town away from the light pollution and just watched it do its thing. It was such an incredible experience to be stood beneath it with zits of lightning strobing frantically around the updraft - I was barely able to fit such a colossal structure into my full frame 12mm lens.
Displays like this are hard to accurately convey if you've never seen this kind of lightning activity before - its not a single strike every few seconds or so, its multiple strikes every single second and its constant for hours.
This is what Great Plains thunderstorms are like.
One thing to note about the activity in this print is that the storms are moving directly away from us but check out the size of the back-sheared anvil - a testament to the amount of energy fuelling these storms.