Spring is upon us and I am badly craving some outdoor excursions and landscape shooting. Largely as a result of convenience, I’ve been doing a lot more portraits lately, but I also really love landscapes. Click the photo above for a larger view.

This week’s photo is another from the trip I took with my brother last fall to Moab. I WOULD have posted one of mine, but I wasn’t able to get any of the lightning. Why didn’t I get lightning? I click the shutter two seconds too late. Yeah, it sucked.

The trick to this shot (without a $300 lightning trigger) is to shoot in relatively low light, which we had at sunset. We were also lucky enough to have a pretty great lighting/thunder storm in the distance, just above the mesas, while we were bone dry. With the low light, we were able to close down the lens and leave the shutter open for quite a while, around 30 seconds. The trick was to have it open while lightning struck.

We were shooting pretty much in tandem – he just started one frame 5 seconds later than I did. So, my shutter closed and about 2 seconds later I saw the lightning bolt. Three seconds after that, my brother’s shutter closed. In those type of situations, one considers tossing the other person’s rig over the 1000 foot drop-off. Luckily, I restrained myself and this great photo resulted.