Thunderhead at Dusk

We drove out to Flandreau, South Dakota, last week and passed through a front of heavy weather, including hail.  There was a picturesque straggler of a cloud at dusk changing from the oranges of sunset to the grays and black of night.  I should have used a tripod - there wasn't much light - but had to settle for setting the camera on a post at the tiny Flandreau airport.  The changes in light were reasonably swift; these photos are in a progression that took roughly 20 minutes.

This is what the cloud look like when we first reached the airport, just before sunset.  

This is a chunk of the cloud.   Not only the lighting but the cloud shifted rapidly - the mass seeming to do a slow boil as I watched.

I spent considerable time as a boy attempting to take pictures of lightning, finding as a rule the best lighting in the strongest storm.  These particular clouds showed a storm with moderate punch - lightning coming every few seconds.  These clouds were too far away to hear thunder.

After the sun went down, I had to go to longer exposures and had better luck capturing the lightning.

This is the last shot and gives some idea of what it looks like.   There are times a camera does a poor job of replicating what the human eyes sees.  The real thing was far more majestic than these pictures suggest.