Went to an Ed Pierce seminar last night (actually only the initial marketing portion) so I could pick up Jeremy Sutton's Painter IX instructional DVDs for $99 instead of $149. Was too tired to attend the educational portion and figured that part exist only to get you excited about the products on display in the marketing section so you'd spend a lot of money!

Returned to our motel room as a horrendous thunderstorm started. It was raining and lightning so heavily that we were afraid to leave the car and we sat there, salivating for our Dean and DeLuca Danish, for about 45 minutes, and just gave up and ventured out into the drenching storm.

Stuck our key card into the entrance door slot and it didn't work! Fortunately we were under cover. A man soon walked by in the lobby and let us in, informing us that there was no power! Emergency generators, thankfully, kept some lights on in the stairway and hallways and it was not quite dark out so we could climb the six flights of stairs and fumble around the room (where our key card did work) and turn on the laptop...our only source of light in our room - which was the only light for this image, taken with my A80. I used ISO 100 for the 1 second self timer triggered exposure.

No editing at all except resizing down and a bit of unsharp masking.
This was edited on a laptop...decided to use a bit of Noise Ninja when I saw on my desktop how noisy the image was from the long exposure. Click on "next" for the result.