Caught a shot of Red Mountain getting a double whammy one night in 2018 as one of our awesome Arizona monsoon storms passed through. A big challenge with lightning photography is that it generally comes with rain, and sometimes a lot of it. If your lucky, the cell is more localized and you can shoot from just outside the rain area. One way or another, your likely to encounter some heavy rain and you have to be prepared if you want to to keep your equipment dry. Most of my lightning shots are composites of multiple exposures from on position - but these two bolts happened close enough together that they were both in the same exposure. Love shooting lightning - like so many aspects of photography; you never know what your going to get.
During monsoon season in Arizona, I am always watching the western skies through the afternoon in case conditions might be right for nice sunset. If it looks like the sky will be sufficiently clear to the far west for the sun to shine up under cloud cover to my near west then we might get a sunset and I head out to find a shot. This was my first attempt at a drone based HDR sunset panorama using the DJI Mavic 2 Pro. As drones have evolved, using them as tools for high end still photography has gotten better and better. This is a combination of 3 frames, each frame compiled as an individual HDR image from 5 bracketed exposures. It excellent as a still photography tool because I can position the drone in just the right spot very quickly in order to get the composition that works best for me.
