Regular Estonian summer!

Actually. Yesterday evening was basically first proper thunderstorm this year. And by looking at weather and lightning maps it was kind of clear where it’s going. Coming from Latvia and going diagonally over southern part of Estonia.

So I grabbed my camera bag, tripod and hit the road. Planned to go to the top side of Võrtsjärv - to the observation tower in Jõesuu. First 45 minutes or so was very boring. Nothing was happening. Sky was basically blue :D

Suddenly it went very much very BOOOM - darkness and wind took over … but no thunder 🤷‍♂️ OK, thunder was just a bit late and finally also came.

Time to take out my camera! That was actually the reason I went looking for thunder. I wanted to see if I can catch lightning without any special triggers and shit. Just my R5 Mark 2 and 24-70mm F2.4 L. AND pre-continuous shooting function. Basically buffers 15 frames before your shot and saves also these 15 images with your shot. On my R5 it should give me about 0.5 seconds to react since it shoots 30 frames per second. 0.5 seconds is not much 🙄 And it shows, as out of 71 shots I got lightning only on 2 shots. To be honest I expected ZERO, so it’s a lot better result.

Don’t ask me why I took only 71 shots! Well .. up there .. on top other observation tower during thunderstorm I not fun place to be. Wind was so strong that rain was raining horizontally and it was A LOT of rain. Most of the time I just spent hiding behind walls. As a bonus, one lightning bolt hit directly the tower - that was fun too - almost got an heart attack there 🦧

Aaand what the heck did I want to say with all of that … Oh, if you find a good dry place to be ( not a wooden dower that sways in the wind and has a lot of open space ) during thunderstorm then YES you can get lightning on the image . And it’s pretty easy too >) I just don’t know if I’m willing to chase storms for some lucky shot …

Pink lightning bolt @ Võrstjärv