A group of us was sitting in the common room of our guest house in a remote part of Ghana, singing a song that includes the line, “There is thunder in His footstep and lightning in His fist.” All of a sudden the curtains started blowing into the room and the shutters were banging. Then this.

This was an awesome and dramatic thunderstorm, with tons of wind and lightning, and we just sat back and watched it make its way across the African savanna until it finally passed out of earshot and we could just catch a few last bursts of lightning on the horizon. So much beauty in that power, and power in beauty.

The fun thing about making this picture of the storm was the fact that I had to get right out there in it to get the angle I wanted. You can see that some water drops on the lens were unavoidable in that situation. The basic technique is to set the camera on a tripod and use either bulb or a long pre-programmed exposure time (in this case, 30 seconds)–and pretty much guess at the rest of the exposure and focus settings. I put the focus at just short of infinity, set the ISO to 200, the aperture to f/8.0, and started shooting. God provided the perfect amount of light with this set of bolts to nail that exposure.