Persistence Cloud-to-cloud Lightning High Knob Cumberland Mountains Southwest Virginia aerial photography David Allio Papa Drone

Persistence – Americana Collection

Lightning is a common summer occurrence in Southwest Virginia. Yet, capturing a lightning bolt is a challenging game of hide-and-seek with mountainous terrain, rain walls, and clouds serving to hide the jagged flashes from my camera location. My archives are filled with images of bright clouds from lightning illumination when the bolt would remain just out of sight. There are rare moments when a small, bright line would appear in the distance, barely visible on the final enlargement.

Photographers from other geographic areas could not comprehend my frustration. Summer lightning on The Plains or in The Mojave Desert provides better surroundings for nature’s massive light shows. In fact, my first-ever big lightning photograph was captured with a flip-phone while sitting in a parked car in Las Vegas, Nevada, far from my native Southwest Virginia. I quickly pulled a DSLR from my Think Tank travel case and produced several memorable works that night. Later, I captured lightning in the background of a sporting event frustrating several other photographers working there. It was not luck. The image was the result of accurate manual exposure calculation.

Although there was success in Hawaii, Nevada, Wisconsin, South Carolina, and even other parts of Virginia, I still had nothing from Southwest Virginia. That all changed in July when I flew a DJI Mavic Pro remote camera platform (UAS) to about 300 feet above ground level (AGL) in Wise and oriented the lens toward a growing storm above High Knob. Decades of storm-chasing frustration evaporated that evening with a single thunderstorm. In a period of ten minutes, multiple lightning flashes were captured in cloud-to-ground and cloud-to-cloud strikes, including this unique image. And so, I present Persistence.


aerial camera platform: DJI Mavic Pro | FAA UAS Part 107 Licensed