December: Adelaide photographer in shock and awe of lightning

John McDermott, an opal miner, artist and keen photographer, was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. In December 2005, in the middle of the night, John was standing knee-deep in the shallows at Moana Beach, south of Adelaide, photographing lightning and its reflection in the water. “Suddenly I felt an electric charge in my hair,” he recalls, “and the tripod was resonating with a bit of a hum like a transformer.” He quickly splashed to dry land, and now vows: “I’ll only do that once!” John’s technique for photographing lightning is to leave the shutter open and use quick reflexes to close it.

The thunderstorm clouds were associated with a pre-frontal trough (a line of low pressure) that had tracked across South Australia during the day, bringing thunderstorms to the metropolitan area. Lightning is the electrical discharge produced when voltage differences established by cumulonimbus clouds are large enough (several hundred million volts) to overcome the insulating effect of the air. Strokes can occur within the cloud, between clouds, or between the cloud and the ground. Thunder is the sound of air rapidly expanding as it is heated to temperatures of up to 30,000 degrees Celsius by the lightning.

Note: The photograph in the printed calendar is NOT watermarked with a copyright symbol and name.

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