Wow! This is beautiful...I have spent hours outside getting bit by bugs in the dark trying to catch something like this. I never have. Congratulations on a beautiful catch!!
This was shot 25 of about 60. It was a very active night for lightning, but also very cloudy, so I caught alot of lightning behind the clouds. Probably only three shots where you could actually see the bolt.
The trees at the bottom of the picture are lit up by the building lights at my apartment complex. I was shooting from the stair well 2.5 floors up, pretty much in line with the tree tops. The reason they aren't very sharp wasn't the converter, that's a result of the noise reduction routine I was using on the shot. Normally I would have put out more effort to preserve their sharpness, but in shot I wasn't concerned with them being in focus. (Actually, I wish they weren't in the shot at all :)
