SNAPSHOT

Photographer JOHN WARNER says he could “feel the electricity in the air” one hot July evening. He decided to drive north from his home in Billings and look for a photographic vantage point to capture the approaching thunderstorm. He ended up pulling off a gravel road about 10 miles north of town, where he set up his camera and tripod as bolts of lightning struck in the distance. “Because the lightning was so rapid and consistent, I thought of trying a four-frame panoramic, which would allow for a telephoto lens to compress the image,” Warner says. “What you see here are four 30-second vertical frames, moving left to right across the landscape, thrown into Photoshop’s Merge to Panoramic Program. I lit the sagebrush foreground with my flashlight to provide depth to the image. The amber glow in the distance comes from the ambient light of Billings. When one strike hit so close that it lit up the foreground and I felt the ground shake, I thought, ‘Whoa, John, you’re not being very smart right now, standing out here in the open holding a tripod,’ and I quickly packed up and headed home.” n