Lightning in a night sky

I was in Jamaica for the past few days where I photographed the sunset every night. Each day, late in the afternoon, thunderclouds would roll in, drop some rain, and then clear out. This is often a good opportunity for some interesting cloud formations to enhance a sunset. The moon was full, as you can see from my previous blog post, and very bright -- so much so that it lit the clouds in the night sky.

This photo was taken in the dark just after sunset. The moon provided sufficient illumination to highlight the clouds and add detail to the scene. An occasional lightning bolt would burst from the distant thundercloud. With the ISO set to 250, I opened the shutter for 13 second exposures, taking one after another, until I captured one of the lightening flashes coming from the cloud.

The shot below is too small to do justice to the scene so I provided a link to download the full res image. Some of the stars were bright enough to record in the darker part of the sky, but at 13 seconds there is a slight motion blur to them as they moved along their course.

I took the photo with a Nikon D800, my first choice for landscape photography, and a 28mm focal length set on a  24-120mm Nikon zoom. Download a full res version of this image by clicking here.