What can I say, a day or two early, but I liked how this panoramic turned out:-) I have to say that we got totally pounded last night with one of the biggest monsoons that I can remember. It peaked at over 800 lightning strikes per minute and maintained this for several hours. That is MORE than 10 per second folks. I estimate that the valley got more than 100,000 strikes that evening. Not bad for about 4,000 square miles of land. Yep that is about 25 strikes per square mile. What can I say, it was a light show.

Seeing that this monsoon storm was coming, I headed out to the Southwest Valley about 10 miles from my home. I found an area that was far enough away from the danger (This is never 100% safe people) and had an OK foreground. I liked the farm/water tower even though some cool cactus/mountains would have been pretty nice as well.

I then took a series of 10 second (ISO 200 & f5.8 to f8.0 for those so inclined) and each location getting several strikes per shot. I then rotated the camera to get the next frame. This lightning was easy hunting folks as it was everywhere. Blending the panorama was a challenge because of dramatically shifting White Balance and Brightness for each strike. This panoramic lightning shot here represents about 3-5 minutes of activity and weighs in at 14MP.