Furious Night

It was a dark, moonless night.

Heavy clouds hung over the city.

Then the storm came, and the night shattered in flashes.

In all the years I’ve watched the weather from my apartment balcony, I’ve managed to capture lightning during a storm only twice — both in July: 2018 and 2022. I’ve already written about the first storm; today I’ve finally gotten around to the photos from the second.

This time I processed them in black and white to emphasize the geometry of the lightning.

The images aren’t very sharp — not because the camera shook (I was, of course, using a tripod), but because the city was hit that night by one of the heaviest downpours in its history. In some frames you can see how the lightning briefly illuminates falling sheets of rain; on long exposure, those streams blur into ghostly streaks of light.

The next shot captures, perhaps, the most powerful strike I’ve ever witnessed. As far as I recall, it was actually several consecutive bolts hitting the exact same spot. On the image, they’ve merged into a single dense channel of light.

Still, most of the lightning appeared alone. Sometimes resembling the silhouette of a tree, sometimes cracks in ice, they drew a new, always unpredictable pattern among the invisible clouds.

And only for an instant.

The fury of the elements has always held a strange allure — and a thunderstorm, with its booming thunder and sudden flashes, is surely one of the most dramatic spectacles on this planet… Perhaps only a volcanic eruption could top it.

When it rains, I always remember a line from Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: «It rained for four years, eleven months, and two days.» Reality, of course, is far more prosaic though that furious night had more than its share of magical realism.

Anyway, it all lasted just over an hour. The storm moved beyond the city, though the sky kept pouring tons of water onto the streets for a long while after. A good deal of time has passed since then, yet I haven’t managed to capture anything quite like it again. 🌩️

Thank you for your attention!