Lightning, July 27th - 28th, Vinkt - Moerbrugge


A 165 km chase, that seemed to become a bust at first, but turned out really nice later after midnight. Popcorn storm active lightning in the Bruges region, mostly CG. While finding a spot in the vicinity of the storm, the CG rate was at about one per 15 seconds. Once taking pictures, the storm was slowly decaying, but still producing a nice amount of clear, pretty close cloud to ground strikes.



At first, we were at quite some distance from the storm, in the small town of Vinkt, south of Bruges. You can see the church tower of Vinkt on some of the pictures. Haziness was too high, and the storm was slowly moving away while activating. On top of that, we were just behind a slight slope of a hill with corn.
Exact location can also be found in the GPS metadata.


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Non recoverable overexposure in RAW

With the storm moving away at a slow speed, we decided to try and catch up with it in the Bruges region. The highway wasn't that far, and luckily the roadworks didn't prevent us from using the express route to the highway at night. While driving along the E40, the amount of close by CG's was impressive, one at about every 15 seconds, in a rather small area, ideal for photography. Unfortunately, the Bruges region is totally flat and densely built. It took us at least 20 minutes to find a reasonable good spot near the Oostkamp exit. This is our location:


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Very close out of frame CG

Highly recoverable RAW image (in the original the sky was washed out white). Color cannot be changed anymore for this image without destroying it. Maybe in this case, a 14bit raw would make a difference.

Small detail from above image bottom right corner

One of a few CC bolts.

Detail from above picture right lightning bolt

Another CC

Crop of the left third of the original

Detail of the bottom part of the above image crop



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