After numerious attempts and a radical camera adjustment, I succeeded in capturing bolts of lightning dissipating thorough the cloud cover.
I could have cleaned-up the photograph in editing—there is some data in the darkened areas. But the idea of the Big Bend galleries is to capture the beauty and nature of Big Bend as it actually appears. The above image does that nicely.
The angry clouds seemed to roll while obscuring starlight. When you consider that Big Bend is hundreds of miles from the lights of any city, you can appreciate just how dark it can be in a desert rainstorm. In fact, whenever the lightning would crackle, for a few
The original image is a Tagged Image Format File (TIFF) with a file data size of
For display on this web site the TIFF was duplicated and the duplicate re-formatted as a Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPG/JPEG) image with a file data size of 11 MB. To approximate detail visible at the time of capture the image was sharpened as necessary and resampled via the Photoshop Bicubic Sharpen algorithm. The re-sampling increases the image resolution from 300 Dots Per Square Inch (DPI) to 360 DPI.
Unless otherwise noted the image was corrected to offset color shift and balance. This restores black (shadows), white (highlights) and neutral gray (neutral mid-tones).
• An unnumbered image is the only one of the subject matter.
• A number corresponds to the sequential order in a subject-matter-related sequence.
• The letter “B” indicates color correction to approximate what was visible when the image was captured.
• The letter “C” indicates enhancement beyond an approximation of what was visible at the time of capture.