lightning

Photographer Ron Risman has created a video that he calls "The Most Spectacular 2.5 Minutes of Lightning." It shows a powerful lightning storm in Kansas synchronized with music.

Have you ever looked out the window of a plane and imagined you were surfing the clouds? Red Bull Air Force member Sean MacCormac took it one step further by skysurfing the edge of a Florida thunderstorm on my most recent assignment, titled "Storm's Edge."

Photographer Matt Taylor was shooting with the 4K photo mode on his Panasonic Lumix G7 on a recent evening when a bolt of lightning flashed across the sky off camera. Taylor's resulting photos show how much the bright flash from a lightning can illuminate a nighttime scene.

It's not 7,207fps to be sure, but this hand-held slow motion iPhone video of lightning lighting up the sky above Ashburn, Virgina is still really cool—all the more so for how accessible shooting slow motion footage like this has become.

A massive thunderstorm over Dubai was recently captured in super slow motion at 1977 frames per second.

My name name is Rustam Azmi, and I'm a photographer based in Dubai. I recently captured this photo of lightning striking the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest skyscraper. In this post I'll share a little about how the shot was made.

Tucson, Arizona-based photography enthusiast Greg McCown recently managed to capture a shot of a lifetime. While shooting landscapes near the small town of Marana, Arizona, McCown snapped this beautiful photo showing both a lightning bolt and a rainbow in the sky.

"After years of trying I finally got my lightning and rainbow picture," McCown writes.

Photographer Evan Halleck was visiting the Grand Canyon recently when he saw a storm brewing in the distance. He drove up to it, set up his camera for a time-lapse sequence, and ended up capturing some incredible images of a thunderstorm pouring rain and lightning into the canyon.

Believe it or not, the image above isn't a digital composite created in Photoshop -- it's a light painting photo captured using a film camera. Photographer Jason D. Page spent four years planning for this shot before finally capturing it in just the right conditions recently.

A violet ray is an antique electrotherapy medical device invented by Nikola Tesla that's essentially a portable tesla coil. Altdorf, Germany-based photographer Marc Simon Frei purchased a unit from 1920 on eBay and customized it for experiments with photographing electricity at home.

Photographer Saulius Lukse recently decided to try his hand at shooting video to capture photos of a lightning strike rather than using a special trigger for still photos. The technique worked well, and is rather efficient thanks to a special script Lukse wrote to quickly find frames containing lightning.

NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman has been on the International Space Station since May 2014. Since arriving on the ISS, Wiseman has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter and Vine by posting jaw-dropping photos and videos of his views during the mission.

Yesterday he posted a simple six-second video that's blowing minds around the web. It shows what a lightning storm here on Earth looks like when viewed from high above our planet.

First things first: the photo above isn't a composite. In fact, as Elizabeth van der Bij of ENV Photography jokingly explained in the comments on her Facebook page, her Photoshop skills "suck", so she couldn't have faked it even if she had wanted to.

No, the Alberta-based photographer and the couple, Kassandra & Craig, simply stuck it out and kept taking pictures as the storm approached until, as luck would have it, the Universe delivered in a big way.

Now there's a family portrait you don't see every day. Photographer Kelly DeLay captured the photo above showing himself and his family standing in front of a gigantic supercell at sunset with a large lightning strike illuminating the horizon.

Some contend that there are no fireworks shows that can best mother nature's display during an intense thunderstorm, and the video above by Chicago-based videographer Craig Shimala goes a long way in confirming their belief.

In an attempt to simplify the workflow of transferring information between your iOS device and computer, the company HYPER has created something called the iStick.

With a lightning connector on one end and a standard male USB connector on the other, the iStick acts as an easy-to-use thumb-drive that transfers photos seamlessly between your iOS device and a computer.

Back in 2010, a series of volcanic eruptions in Iceland captured the world's attention. Although they were relatively small in scale, the ash that was spewed into the air disrupted air travel across Europe for a number of days. Photographer Sigurdur Stefnisson witnessed the eruptions first hand, and was able to capture a series of jaw-dropping photographs showing the power and scale of the ash clouds, lightning, and lava.

If it ever was a secret, it sure isn't anymore: we LOVE photos from space. And judging by the response we typically get to sharing them, so do you, which is why we were so excited when we stumbled across these magnificent images of lightning NASA released just a couple of days ago.

Michael Shainblum captured this perfectly timed (call it luck if you want, but luck favors the prepared, so we're going with perfectly timed) shot of lightning striking the Burj Khalifa during a storm on Wednesday of last week.

These images by Chilean photographer Francisco Negroni of the Cordón Caulle volcano erupting are so jaw-dropping and mind-blowing that we're finding it hard to come up with appropriate adjectives. Billowing clouds of ash are joined by spiderwebs of Volcanic lightning to create a light show that truly drives home Mother Nature's terrifying splendor.

We've featured some amazing instances of lightning strikes being caught on camera in the past, but none quite like this. The video above is security camera footage that shows what it's like to have a bolt of lightning strike the ground just a hop, skip, and a jump away.

I took this picture with one of five remote-controlled cameras I’d set up by the side of the track to capture the race winner from various angles and perspectives. Of course, I didn’t know for sure who’d win, but when I was setting up the gear it seemed like a fair bet to focus on Usain Bolt’s lane!

Hey aspiring storm chasers -- want to dramatically improve your lightning shots? Try getting an elevated view. Like about 400 miles up. That's the approximate orbital height above Earth of the International Space Station, which is producing an impressive library of images showing what lightning looks like from way above.

Yesterday we shared a beautiful photo showing 4th of July fireworks overlaid on a flash of lightning. After seeing that image, photographer Delilah Carter of DC Photography got in touch with us to say that she had also captured fireworks and lightning together this past weekend.

Some people have all the luck right? The above photo was taken by photographer Jason Smith, and it's a great example of the right place meeting the right time. While taking 4th of July photos at a friend's house, he was able to capture a lightning strike that synched perfectly with some fireworks.

This incredible photo of a lightning strike at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon was shot by photo and videographer Travis Roe in July of 2012. A spectacular capture by a photog who has been shooting lightning since he was a teenager, the most surprising thing about this photo is that it went viral only after it somehow didn't even place in the National Parks Service 2012 photo contest.

According to the Encyclopedia of World Climatology, lightning happens about 40–50 times per second worldwide; that translates into almost 1.4 billion flashes per year. But of the 1.4 billion that happen in 2011, we're pretty sure this was the only one captured at 11,000 frames per second, turning a one second lightning flash into an incredible 6 minute experience.

Here’s a wedding photographer who probably wishes now that he had set up a second camera with a lightning …

Now that storm season for North America is either already here (or coming soon), I thought it would be a good time to write a tutorial on how to photograph lightning.

Lightning is a very elusive beast that many seem to struggle with, so read on, and by the end you will be able to hunt and capture it like a pro!

The Sakurajima volcano in southern Japan has been quite active so far in 2013, and photographer Martin Rietze recently traveled to the site to document the eruptions through photographs. His images capture smoke billowing out of the crater, lava exploding in trails of orange light, and lightning flashing back and forth inside the dark ash cloud.

Photographing a lightning strike from close-up is a difficult and dangerous task, but Toronto-based wedding photographer and weather buff Richard Gottardo managed to capture something even crazier: a double-exposure photograph caused by the bolt of lightning itself.

Photographer Tom Warner shot this slow motion incredible video of lightning at 7,207 …

Photographing lighting from the ground is cool enough, but if you happen to be taking pictures of a thunderstorm from, say, space (we know, unlikely, but never say never) on rare occasions you may capture something like what you see above. This is a picture of a "red sprite," a phenomenon that takes place when lightning doesn't shoot down but instead explodes 50-miles high in the clouds and fires red tendrils even higher.

There are plenty of light-sensitive triggers on the market, some triggers even use your smartphone, but Ubertronix's new StrikeFinder app is the first mobile app that lets you actually take the pictures with your phone. Instead of designing a trigger app that attaches to an external camera, the StrikeFinder app released earlier today lets everyday iPhone users simply point their phone camera in the direction of say, lightning or fireworks, and the phone does the rest for them.

The Nero Multi Trigger is a nifty camera triggering device that can make …

Between August and October of this year, the crew onboard the International Space Station used a Nikon D3S (at high ISOs) to capture photographs of Earth as they zipped around it at 17,000mph. Michael Konig then took the footage and compiled it into this eye-popping time-lapse video showing what our planet looks like from up there.

This amazing photograph by Ricardo Mohr shows the volcano …

This incredible time-lapse video was created using photos captured from the International Space Station at night. [It] begins over …