2001-08-07
People: Myself
Miles: 150
I arrived in northwest Arizona around 2:00pm MST traveling through Kayenta towards Flagstaff. To the north was a small thunderstorm which was moving slowly south. I stopped about 20 miles west of Kayenta and tried to photograph lightning from the storm, but because this was the mid-afternoon your success is always less than during the night. The best way to photograph daytime lightning in situations like these is to wait for a strike with multiple return strokes and be quick with the shutter. You'll never catch the first channel, but if there are return strokes, you can be fast enough to catch them, which was how the photograph below was captured. This shot was hand-held, balanced on the door frame of my truck, with a shutter speed of approximately 1/30 second.

After leaving Tuba City, AZ, I ran into another thunderstorm along the highway. To the north, a large cloud of red dust was visible, moving slowly south. When the dust arrived, it was only a minute before the rain arrived as well, coating my truck with red mud. The storm continued to produce lightning for a good hour, and I drove south of the dust to photograph the storm again. That evening I arrived in Flagstaff but didn't encouter any more thunderstorms until the next day.

Weather Data for August 7th, 2001