Umm, so I almost got struck by lightning. Wanna see the video?
 

Remember the other day when I posted about how there’s a thunderstorm the every afternoon down here? Well, in addition to snapping the stills I posted, I switched my handy little camera into video mode and tried to capture some of the lightning strikes. At the time of shooting, I was a little miffed that I hadn’t caught anything. I kept pointing the camera one way, and the bolts would flash down outside of my field of view. I’d stop and pan over, and then they’d flash down just where I had been filming. Except at one point I thought I had caught a weird flash. Watching the footage at home later, I was again disappointed that I didn’t get a shot of any of those majestic lightning bolts, but it seemed like there was a small unremarkable flash at the end of one of my shots.

Upon further review, there appear to have been two bolts each from the ground up and top down that struck LESS THAN 15 FEET FROM ME. I’m now sure that if I hadn’t been standing LESS THAN 15 FEET FROM THE LIGHTNING BOLTS they would have appeared plenty majestic. Uhh, let’s just move on. So what you will see is, apparently, the very bottom part of a couple of bolts of lightning. Also, you’ll see a weird grayish vapor color from where the bolt just struck that stays onscreen for several frames after I ALMOST GOT STRUCK BY LIGHTNING.

Please note that these pictures have not been altered in any way and are lifted directly from the video I shot on the scene. In fact, here’s a short quicktime movie (14mb, quicktime users can scrub through the relevant bits using the left and right arrow keys on your keyboards).

We’ll start with a clean frame and proceed from there: