Lightning can be an elusive and risky subject to photograph. On a warm August evening Sandy and I attended the Lane County Fair in our hometown, Eugene. To conclude our evening we chose to ride the ferris wheel. As our "chair" rose to the highest point we saw flashes in the sky to the south. Racing home we gathered the cameras and tripods and made our way to Spencer's Butte in the center of town. By the time we had set up the camera about 100 persons had gathered on the butte. Lightning flashed frequently behind the south hills. The strikes began to move slightly East and I feared it would move away from the city center which was the subject I truly wanted. I put on my widest lens and rotated the view camera slightly East but kept the city center on the right side.

I stood on a rubber mat which I had grabbed at the house and locked the shutter open with a locking cable release. Then I hunkered down on the rubber mat and waited. I knew from experience I needed a two minute exposure for the city lights to show. For the first two exposures not much happened. Then a burst of lightning to the left and deafening thunder. As the two minutes were not up I waited........Then a second strike at city center. At this point I thought I should have captured at least one of the strikes and the storm with heavy rain was moving straight toward us. Knowing that we had exceeded reasonable caution I grabbed the camera and jumped into the car. We rode out the storm surrounded by thunder and lightning for another 30 minutes. No other strikes hit the downtown, so I considered us as extremely lucky to get the image and even luckier not to have been struck by lightning.