My daughter and a friend like to walk in the evening. They got ambitious last might and walked the 2 miles or so to the ocean. Unfortunately when they turned to come home, this is what they saw bearing down on them, complete with flashes of lightning. I was called to the rescue with the car, and, while there, of course, had to try to capture the sky. It is really more impressive (even more impressive :)) in the enlarged view available by clicking the image.

Nikon Coolpix P500 at 23mm equivalent field of view, f3.4 @ 1/125th @ ISO 200. Programmed auto with Active-D Lighting.

This took more than my usual processing in Lightroom. I did not think to switch the White Balance to Cloudy, and the auto WB did not respond well…the clouds were blue, blue, blue. Auto WB in Lightroom took care of most of it, but I also had to selectively reduce the saturation of the blue and aqua bands, using the color selection tool in the HSL panel. To capture the visual effect, I also had to reduce overall brightness. Though it still looks a bit strange…it did in fact look a bit strange in reality. Very weird light!

A little luminance noise reduction smoothed the dark sections of the clouds.

Finally, since I had the camera tipped up a sharp angle, and the zoom set to 23mm, the wide-angle distortion was very visible in the houses and beach structures, especially on the right. Lightroom’s lens and vertical distortion tools restored correct perspective, at the cost of minor cropping of the top right and left.