An Alternate Universe

This photo began my infatuation with night photography.  Unfortunately my camera has only a maximum of 15 seconds exposure time.  When I get better at night photography, I think I'm going to buy a good reflecter telescope and start taking pictures of nebula, the moon, and perhaps some galaxies.  This photo was taken outside my old apartment building in the summer of 2006 in Vermillion, SD.  In the distance (eastward) a midnight storm flickers incessantly with lightning.  The blue light that you can see is actually the light generated over several seconds of exposure, otherwise the night sky looked pitch black.

I happened to look outside one morning in the early fall of 2006 and noticed this magnificently thick fog covering everything.  There wasn't any wind to speak of.  I grabbed the camera, jumped in the truck and headed out to the country in search of a neat shot.  I went hiking up into the hills on the Nebraska side of the Missouri and stumbled around wide-eyed like a kid in a museum.  I met a stray dog along a trail and once he caught a glimpse of me, he bolted.  He (or she, I guess) was probably just as surprised to see me emerge from the fog as I was to see him.  I would have loved to capture the look on his face for posterity, but I just wasn't ready.  Later, driving down a dirt road, several deer crossed in front of me but, again, I was too slow.  Two priceless shots no one else but me will ever see (at least not in the exact same confluence of time and place).  The dirt road took me down along the river shore, right below the new bridge connecting South Dakota and Nebraska several miles south of Vermillion, SD.  I caught this scene right as the birds began to conjure up their twilight symphonies, and just before the river folk began to sip their morning coffee.  All this bridge is is a giant slab of concrete, which is really no more significant than a small slab of concrete, but the largeness of objects forces us to the edge of awe simply because we take a moment to appreciate its existence, like we would the existence of the universe itself.  I'm reminded of Rene Magritte's painting of the giant apple filling up an entire room.

This is my first capture of a lightning bolt.  I had just finished my shift at the pizza place where I worked and I was so excited about the lightning capture that I raced back to show it to my boss before he finished closing shop.  Afterwards, I headed "below the hill" to the Vermillion airport (Vermillion is partially situated on a bluff overlooking the Missouri river valley) in order to attempt catching some more.  I didn't realize how difficult that would prove to be.  I snapped this photo using a Canon Powershot S2 IS with a 15 second exposure, facing southwest.  It was around midnight, late in the summer of 2006 (August).  The lamp in the distance marks the parking lot at Clay County park, just west of Vermillion, SD.  The camera was precariously placed on the dashboard of my truck (you can see a slight ghost of windshield-wiper movement appearing on the left of the photograph).  It may seem at first or second glance that the lightning is touching the power lines, but that is only an optical illusion.  Notice that the bolt travels behind a few puffs of cloud before dispersing in the larger embankment.  If the bolt had hit the power lines, it would have traveled in front of the smaller clouds.  I moved to Illinois about a week after this photo was taken in order to get married and start a new life.  This photo reminds me of that exciting transitional period when God's hand moved so prolifically through events it seemed almost possible to glimpse the Man behind the curtain.