Grand Canyon Lightning 2024: Part 2

Gary Hart Photography: Bent, Grand Canyon Lightning

Bent, Grand Canyon Lightning
Sony a7R V
Sony 24-105 f/4 G
ISO 50
f/18
1/6 second

When I returned from my Grand Canyon Monsoon photo workshop earlier this month, I was so excited about this year’s last-day lightning experience that I immediately processed a few images and sat down to blog about them. But when my blog started approaching 4000 words, I thought for everyone’s sanity (both yours and mine), it might not be a bad idea to split my ramblings into two blogs. In the first one I detailed, among other things, the story of the actual shoot that produced nearly 60 lightning images on the day the workshop ended. I also wrote about the Southwest monsoon in general, and the genesis of my lightning chasing obsession.

Now I’ll move on to some of the science of lightning, and my thoughts on including lightning in an image. Without further adieu…

Here’s Part 2

When you’ve been writing a weekly photo blog for over 13 years, at some point you’re bound to run out of new things to say. When that happens, the goal becomes finding fresh ways to express potentially stale thoughts. So forgive me if you’ve heard this before, but it bears repeating: Landscape photography captures the relationship between Nature’s enduring and ephemeral elements.

In the simplest terms possible, Nature’s enduring elements are those landscape features we travel to view and photograph, confident in the knowledge that they’ll be waiting for us when we arrive: mountains, lakes, rocks, trees, waterfalls, and so on. On the other hand, Nature’s ephemeral phenomena include the always changing light and weather, celestial events, and seasonal variations that play in, on, and above the landscape—never-guaranteed phenomena we might hope (and plan) to find when we arrive at our enduring destinations, but also those conditions that simply surprise (or disappoint) us. Regardless of how they converge, the landscape photographer’s job is to combine the best of Nature’s enduring and ephemeral elements in the most compelling way possible.

Pretty straightforward, right? For some things perhaps, but maybe not so much for others. I’d put lightning in the not-so-much category: for starters, we never know where it will strike next, or if it will even strike at all. And even when it does happen, lightning comes and goes faster than our shutter fingers can respond. But, like most of Nature’s most fickle ephemeral phenomena (alliteration anyone?), the more I understand lightning, the better my success.

Where my lightning pursuit is concerned, it doesn’t hurt that I’ve always been something of a weather nerd, starting in my early teens with an inexplicable fascination with the weather forecast segment of KGO-TV’s (Channel 7 in San Francisco) nightly news (thank you, Pete Giddings), continuing with meteorology classes in college, as well as my ongoing consumption of weather articles, books, blogs, and podcasts.

Despite this general interest in meteorology, I never really took the time to study lightning closely until I started trying to photograph it. I knew the basics, but the deeper I looked, the more fascinated I became. And not coincidentally, the more lightning success I had.

For starters, a lightning bolt is an atmospheric manifestation of the truism that opposites attract. When two oppositely charged objects come in close proximity, an equalizing spark is produced. For example, when you get shocked touching a doorknob, on a very small scale, you’ve been struck by lightning.

On the atmospheric scale, understanding the mechanism isn’t too difficult to get your mind around if you remember a few basic facts:

Warm air rises because it’s less dense than cold air. And cold air falls because it’s more dense.
This warm air rising, cold air falling thing is the underlying engine of convection: air that’s warmer than its surroundings rises, until it cools enough be colder than its surroundings.
Since warm air holds more moisture (water vapor) than cold air, anything that makes air cooler (like rising through the atmosphere) squeezes its moisture out, which causes its contained water vapor to condense and form clouds.
The greater the temperature difference between the warmer lower layers of the atmosphere, and colder higher layers, the more unstable the atmosphere is said to be. This instability drives the convection process that leads to thunderstorms.
Warm air will continue rising until it is no longer warmer than the surrounding air, potentially ascending high enough for the water vapor it carries to condense and freeze. Or until it encounters an inversion.
An inversion is a cap (layer) of warmer air sitting atop cooler air, an aberration that puts the brakes on the rising warm air.

Of course weather phenomena are rarely simple, but in general the ingredients for lightning are moist air (high humidity), an unstable airmass atmosphere uncapped by inversion, and surface heating to initiate the convection process. With these ingredients in place, adjacent columns of ascending and descending air generate collisions between the contained water molecules.

When ascending and descending water molecules collide, negatively charged electrons stripped by the collision attach to descending molecules, giving them a net negative charge; the remaining molecules, now with a missing electron and a net positive charge, are lighter and continue upward. This electron imbalance is called ionization. The result is a polarized cloud that’s positive on top and negative at the bottom. The most powerful convective updrafts carry water droplets high enough that they freeze, shifting the ionization process into overdrive with ice particle collisions.

Since nature really, really wants to correct a charge imbalance, and always takes the easiest path, if the easiest path to electrical equilibrium is between the cloud top and cloud bottom, we get intra-cloud lightning; if it’s between two different clouds, we get inter-cloud lightning. And when the net charge beneath the cloud is positive while the cloud bottom is negative, we get cloud-to-ground lightning. (This describes negative lightning; positive lightning, where the cloud/ground charges are reversed, is also possible, but less common.)

In addition to the vertical motion within a thunderstorm, there is also horizontal motion that moves a cell across the landscape. This movement feels a little more random because it’s driven by invisible winds in the middle levels of the atmosphere. But keeping an eye on a storm can at least enable a general understanding of the direction it’s moving—important information when you want to photograph lightning (also when you want to stay alive).

With lightning comes thunder, the sound of air expanding explosively when heated by a 50,000-degree jolt of electricity. While lightning’s flash zips to our retinas at more than 186,000 miles per second, thunder lumbers along at the speed of sound, a pedestrian 750 miles per hour—nearly a million times slower than light.

Knowing that the thunder occurs at the same instant as the lightning flash, and the speed at which both travel, we can calculate the approximate distance of the lightning strike. While we see the lightning pretty much instantaneously, thunder takes about 5 seconds to cover a mile. So dividing by 5 the number of seconds between the instant of the lightning’s flash and the arrival of the thunder’s crash gives you the lightning’s approximate distance in miles (divide by 3 for kilometers).

Technically, if you’re close enough to hear the thunder, you’re close enough (probably within 10 miles) to be struck by the next lightning bolt. But watching lightning at Grand Canyon over the last dozen years, I’ve become pretty comfortable reading the conditions and determining when the storm’s too close. I still err on the side of safety, shutting down a shoot sooner than many in the group might like, but I haven’t lost anyone yet, so I must be doing something right. (And seriously, I know people understand when I terminate a shoot because lightning is too close, and it frustrates me just as much as it does them.)

Understanding thunderstorms in general, and lightning creation in particular, has helped me more accurately determine where to point my camera for the best chance of success. Given the number of Grand Canyon vistas with views extending dozens of miles up, down, and across the canyon, at the beginning I’d just point my camera and Lightning Trigger in the direction of any cloud that was producing rain. But now I know that all rainclouds aren’t created equal, and that the clouds most likely to produce lightning are the darkest and tallest. The darker a cloud, the more moisture it contains, and the greater the potential for ionizing collisions. The taller a cloud, the more likely it is to contain the ice that supercharges the ionization process.

And since lightning often precedes thunderstorm’s motion, striking the rim (or inside the canyon) in front of the falling rain I’d previously targeted my compositions on, I’ve become better able to anticipate where the next bolt might strike and adjust my composition proactively.

On the day I captured this (and nearly 60 other) lightning images, with ample monsoon moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and an uncapped atmosphere, all that was needed was warming sunlight to kick off the convection process that sends the moisture skyward. The morning started cloudless, and from my vantage point at Grand Canyon Lodge (right on the North Rim), by midmorning I could see billowing clouds far to the south. Even though the workshop had ended that morning, about half the group had stayed, so I summoned them with a text message.

We started seeing lightning less than an hour later. During the three or so hours of activity, it was fun watching various cells bloom, mature, and peter out. During most of that period of activity there was overlap, as one cell was diminishing, another was starting up—sometimes in the same general direction, other times over a completely different part of the canyon. The overall trend of the storms’ motion was east-to-west, across the canyon, along the South Rim.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating that I think the absolute best way to really appreciate lightning is to spend time closely scrutinizing a still image. With a lifespan measured in milliseconds, a lightning bolt is the epitome of ephemeral—whether in person or in a video, it’s a memory before we fully register that lightning just fired. We have a general idea of its location and overall shape, but it’s not until we’re presented with a frozen instant of that lightning bolt’s peak energy that we fully understand the details of what took place.

It doesn’t take long to realize that each strike has its own personality, distinctly different from all others. Examining my images later, I always look to process the lightning images with the most personality. One bolt’s most striking (pun unavoidable) feature might be the circuitous route it followed to get from cloud to ground, or the network of related simultaneous bolts associated with it, or the numerous spiderweb filaments it produced, or maybe the sheer power and brilliance it displayed.

Thinking in terms of matching these ephemeral features with the enduring canyon, on a macro scale the enduring aspect was determined when I decided to visit Grand Canyon during monsoon season. But my decisions for how to combine the landscape ephemeral lightning have evolved, influenced now by the knowledge I’ve gained, and also by shifting priorities. With so many in my images lightning portfolio, my goal is no longer to capture lightning no matter what (by simply pointing in the direction most likely to get lightning, regardless of the scene there)—now I can now afford to factor the better composition into my framing decisions. While that shift might reduce the number of strikes I capture, it increases the chance of getting strikes I especially like.

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