Photographer Rolf Maeder used long exposures to catch many lightning bolts hitting the Grand Canyon amid dramatic stormy sky.
Sometimes an opportunity appears out of nowhere. Maeder and two pals were travelling from Sedona to the Grand Canyon on August 30th to capture some sunset photos.
Maeder elaborates:
We quickly realised that we couldn’t achieve what we needed due of the extremely foggy light. So we decided to go back to Sedona and check out some more vistas.
We spotted a lightning storm developing far distant from Moran Point. That was far more than we had anticipated, so we began putting up our tripods and taking shots. The photograph of the two lightning strikes was taken at 9 p.m. using a Nikon D800, a 24mm lens at f/8, ISO 400, and a 25-second exposure. Because of the lengthy exposure, I was able to get two lightning bolts in one photo!
The Grand Canyon stretches for 277 miles, is up to 18 miles wide, and is over a mile deep. As they carved their channels through layer after layer of rock, the Colorado River and its tributaries have exposed over two billion years of Earth’s geological history. These images were obtained from Moran Point (7160 feet) on the canyon’s South Rim.
