Thanks to Laramie correspondent Galen Wolk for sending me this incredible lightning strike photo on Centennial Ridge in Southeastern Wyoming. The photo was actually captured RANDOMLY from a webcam set to take a picture every ten minutes. Webcam guru Sam Trautman just happened to see it on the feed and was able to save it before the image changed. There was talk that the lightning may have actually triggered the camera to shoot, but the theory was that it probably would have messed up the software as well. Pretty amazing really. Thanks Guys!
Nice shot!
I don’t know anything about that particular camera, but just last week we were having problems in our lab with radiated radio frequency noise causing one of our cameras to trigger. I would be really surprised if the noise pick-up from lightning would mess up much else in the camera, unless there was a surge on the power to the camera. I’d be more concerned that the time lag between triggering and the exposure would miss the lightning strike.
Too bad we don’t have more lightning here in Vancouver, it would be something neat to play around with.
My brother worked for the forest circus when we were going to school in Larry land. He would be out in the bush for a week at a time building trail and would come back with stories of others who had been struck and killed by lightning. The stories were rather gory – I’ll spare the details. Crazy country down there in the Sierra Madre & Medicine Bow mountain ranges of SE Wyoming.