If you follow my posts on Facebook and Instagram, you know I work a lot in Photoshop, and you would immediately think this picture is a composite. It isn't. I was staying in a bed and breakfast establishment in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico a few years ago and had gone to bed. About 10:30pm I awoke to very loud thunder, and I tried to go back to sleep but kept seeing remarkable flashes of lighting through the curtains of the room. I thought, Ok, I have nothing to lose, I'll try to photograph the light show. I set up the tripod on the balcony with a clear view of the city, set the shutter speed to 30 seconds, the lens aperture to f/16, and the ISO to 200. When nothing happened in the first 30 second exposure, I tried again and repeated the process until I captured what you see here. Usually I use f/8 for lightning, but I was afraid of overexposing the city lights. This was originally a horizontal shot, but for visual impact I cropped it vertically. Otherwise, this is completely un-manipulated.
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