I was working on my trip report webpage for that fog at murray hill when I heard a crack of thunder. I quickly jumped off and grabbed all the camera gear and ran out the door to the car. I'm sure I looked rediculus doing it, fumbling everything around, I didn't even look at the radar, I just left. I was going to go to this lake, but realized that the park had closed at 10pm (its now 11:30pm) So I just drove west to the nearest country road where I could pull over and shoot from my car. I witnessed a nice Downdraft and clear base around it, and I took a series of images and put them into a GIF to show the movement of the storm (coming right at me) here is the animation: (it might be a little slow, since its so big)
I stayed here and tryed to catch a close CG, which I did, but it overexposed. It's really tough to shoot lightning, you have to either go for the close ones and stop down to F22 (but then you miss the dimmer ones) or go for the dimmer ones and have the big ones overexpose. I was actually shooting for the inbetween bolts here with f/9 I think.
Just about a minute after this big cg It started hailing and one actually hit my camera, so I pulled everything in a started to drive away, and it got pretty intense, about pea sized hail and quite a bit of lightning. I got home and shot out my windows, but none of those really turned out, but later that night another line came through and I caught this one.
Nice to get some good lightning, I hope to get a shot just like the first this summer, only properly exposed