Nighttime storms

The clouds building to the east, light from the Midnight Sun, rain in the lower right corner, blue-darkened sky to the north, all around incredible lighting situation.
Rumbles of thunder shook the house for a while last night as some big storms moved to our south and east. It was about 10 minutes until midnight when I went outside to take some pictures of the giant clouds. The sunlight was strong on the tops of the clouds making for some interesting photographs.

It’s been kind of nice having it so overcast the last few days. With sunset times still at 12:40 am and sunrise at 3:10 am the gloomy clouds cast a bit of darkness over us. I am getting pretty good at falling asleep when the Sun is still out though. The light is going to end quickly; we will lose just under 3.5 hours of sunlight in the month of July.

Tomorrow is our one-year anniversary! We haven’t really decided what we will be doing yet with our super-tight summer budget, but it will most likely involve some sort of a day-outing and picnic. Whatever we do it will be a great. My wife deserves it – mostly because she has lived in a cabin with no running water in the middle of Alaska with me for almost a year. Possibly mountains will be involved. I will take pictures.

Some more pictures of our midnight storm:

It makes for a really dynamic lighting situation to have such strong, dense, layered clouds when the Sun is low on the horizon at midnight. I used three exposures: +2 0 -2 stops for this image. Some of the other HDR images from this night came out overdone, but I loved this one.