I’ve photographed quite a few electrical storms over the years but I certainly don’t consider myself a stormchaser. If I look at the radar and it says a storm’s heading my way I’ll happily get somewhere nearby and photograph it, but I’m not the sort of photographer who’ll drive for six hours to be in front of one. In the case of this particular electrical storm, I could see on the radar that it was going to be tracking northwards along the coast, over the top of Seven Mile Beach National Park, pretty much on sunset, so I hurried over to Gerroa and waited for it to arrive.
This particular image was taken the same way I shoot all of my lightning shots, which is by simply keeping the lens open as much as possible. I choose an aperture long enough to keep the shutter open for a decent interval and then I set the camera to continue taking photographs. Sometimes I miss out, because the camera is between shots and sometimes I get lucky. This 1.5 second exposure was one of the good ones.