Photo by Mike Casscles

Double Strike

A series of thunderstorms passed east of the greater Vancouver WA / Portland OR area the evening of Thursday, May 28. I packed up the camera gear and headed up into the SW Washington State Cascade foothills near Jackson Pass in the Jones Creek ORV/DNR lands, to a spot that provided a clear view to the east and south and set up my camera for long exposure interval shooting in the hopes of catching some strikes. Every 10 shots I would stop and adjust settings for the waning light. These particular strikes happened within seconds of each other at around 9/15pm, landing on the same single exposure. I had just removed my ND1000 filter as it was getting darker. This was the only image I got that night that captured any lightning.

Shot on a Nikon Z8, Nikon 24-120mm f/4 S lens, 25s exposure, ISO 200, f/10.

Editing notesEdited on On1 2026.4. As with most of my editing, I let the app do the heavy lifting for me. Started off with Develop/BrillianceAI, and then made adjustments to the image as a whole to bring out the dark mood of an approaching thunderstorm. I set the Tone profile to ON1 Landscape and proceeded to make tone adjustments to enhance the dark mood of the image. On the Local tab, I made mods to both the Flora and Sky masks created by BrillianceAI to bring out the contrast and colors of the clouds & forest without blowing them out or making them unrealistic. For this image, I also used both NoNoiseAI and Tack Sharp AI to sharpen the lightning and take some of the noise out of the sky and clouds. On the Effects tab, I added both the Dynamic Contrast and Color Enhancer effects. The DC was set to Surreal and scaled back almost 3/4 as to not make the trees appear so 'crisp'. Color Enhancer was set to Sky. This image is also cropped to Portrait orientation from Landscape.

Double Strike

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