I had been out photographing the whole day, and just as I called it quits and returned to the hotel. It started rumbling in the distance, I wasn’t quite sure on where the thunderstorm was, and I soon gave up trying to find a good spot to photograph it, and returned to my hotel.
But as it turned out, the best view of the thunderstorm was from the balcony on the hotel I was staying in, which of course was totally awesome.

First I made an HDR photo, for the foreground of the town and the church tower, the clouds and the mountains. Then I made some long exposures in order to capture the lightning.

In post I started out by making the HDR, like I normally do. This one is made in HDREfex Pro 2 from Nik.
Then I masked in the lighting from two of the long exposures, containing the two best caught lighting strikes.

• Camera: NIKON D800
• Shutter speed: 30s
• Aperture: ƒ/8
• ISO: 100
• Focal length: 14mm
• Taken: 1 August, 2012
• Location:

Tyrol Lightning by Bo47 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

2012 Austria Church Europe Gasthof Bär Geotag HDR Lightning Long Exposure Mountains Nikkor 14-24mm f:2.8 Nikon D800 Patsch Town Tyrol