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Figured I should, like, update or something. Isn’t that what blogs do?

Well, the afternoon ended up being a wash thanks to Brooklyn’s current obsession with pouring rain every other day. First it was the fixed gear bikes, and now this! I guess that’s the way this whole “end times” thing is going to go… plenty of crap weather to go around. For example, here are a few photos of crap weather from a few days ago. Just imagine they were taken today, because it’s pretty much doing the same shit out there right now.

The years have taught me that strange rumblings from the sky bring many a photo op. Plus, it’s not like there’s much else to do during a thunderstorm than stare out the window anyway.

I don’t know if it’s a gift or a curse, but every time a see a photo of lightning I get “Master of Puppets” stuck in my head. I’ll admit it, it’s weird. Sure, “Ride the Lightning” would make a lot more sense… Hell, “Master of Puppets” isn’t even on the album Ride the Lightning. It’s a completely senseless mental association. But I guess that’s heavy metal for you. Why make sense when you can rock?

Talk about your all-time happy accidents. I didn’t think I actually caught this lightning bolt when I took the shot, especially considering I was wielding my lowly point and shoot. Just proof of the old theory that if you take enough photos of the same thing, eventually you’ll get something worthwhile, I guess.

Sorry to all of you who can’t go skateboarding today, but hey, that’s why beer was invented!

And so here we are, at the great cloud post of 2010. As I mentioned earlier this week, when we set up our tents at the campsite, shit started looking mighty foreboding horizon-wize. Tornados warnings were on high alert, or something. But the wind and thunderstorms really spoke for themselves. And the fact that it all went down at sunset… prolonging it to sublime, surreal lengths… well, let’s just say I was in a frenzy.

I felt like I was at an Epcot Center light show, almost — and I have a very small bit of video capturing a particularly cool lightning storm on the horizon coming soon to really beat this dead horse into its grave. But for now, here are the photos, in all the colors of the rainbow, including an actual rainbow (look for it! It’s like Where’s Waldo… but more naturey).

God’s vagina.

After all that, I may never have to shoot another photo of a sunset again. …Yeah…

Some more experiments in capturing lightning in a CF card. Unfortunately, like my first go-round, I was woefully unprepared this time as well — as if that wasn’t immediately obvious. No tripod. No cable release. At 2:00 am, craning my neck over the couch, stoned and sleep deprived, these are the best I could muster.

Pardon the blurriness — it can be difficult to focus a shot looking into the pitch black night through a little viewfinder. I know… what a whiner. The sky was doing some weird shit, and I couldn’t tell if there was any actual lightning or just an illuminated cluster of clouds by looking at the camera’s LCD. It does appear to be actual lightning, but it’s some pretty strange looking lightning all the same. Kind of like a naughty little angel taking a leak. And I was really hoping for something a little more classic…

Well… I’ll take it. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again… like a couple hundred times in 5 minutes.

Chicago’s been getting whacked with some kick ass thunderstorms these last couple weeks. Now, like so many of my kind — who thrive on dry asphalt and warm weather to best enjoy our extracurricular love affair of choice — I hate precipitation in almost all of its dreadful, disgusting forms. However, I make but one special exception for the quintessential epic summer storm.

A few days ago I awoke to a rumbling behemoth just south of my apartment, and through some mixture of luck, the storm’s intensity, and wake-and-bake induced focus, I managed to snag a couple elusive shots of lightning bolts. These were firsts for me, but there have been more since…

Without a tripod (to say nothing of patience), it’s hard to get good shots of lightning. The composition here is not quite ideal, but without a tripod or shooting successive bursts at a time, I think this is really the best I could hope for. Frankly, the storm itself deserves all the credit for making this even remotely possible — there were so many flashes of lightning I was starting to feel like I was in that scene from War of the Worlds when fucking Dakota Fanning won’t stop screaming.