This was one of my very favourite lightning strikes of the journey; occuring at some point in the early afternoon of July 17th. It was more of a technical challenge to shoot this than it was with the night-time ones in the video clip because of the amount of daylight in the scene. It means you can't do much long-exposure work because it will just overexpose the image and give you a blank white sky, so it's all about quick reactions, estimating the time between strikes and a bit of luck. This storm was a quickly moving one...it rolled in over the Mogollon mountain rim from the east and quickly traversed the valley. We all jumped into the truck and went storm chasing to enjoy the show; driving right into the heart of it! Upon jumping out of the vehicle, I don't think I had ever been pelted with rain quite so hard in all my life. It was truly savage and the biggest difficulty was keeping my lens dry of water spots until my Dad rather helpfully suggested that I turn in the opposite direction of the wind, where some equally nice lightning was striking ;-) This one hit a nearby hillside just as I turned round and pressed the shutter, which left a big grin on my face. Click here for an overhead view of where this was shot.