Early this morning, photographer Dave DiCello was awakened by a thunderstorm sweeping through Pittsburgh. He had trouble falling back to sleep — a stroke of fortune sparking an unforgettable shot.
He explained how insomnia made it possible:
I was awoken by the storms today about 2:15 and after remembering that I never closed the garage door, [I] wasn’t able to fall back asleep. So, after getting a few things done, I checked the radar, and saw more storms were on their way, closing in fast on the city, getting in my car at 3:52. Well, just 28 minutes later, I was completely soaked when this INCREDIBLE bolt struck the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh.
DiCello described it as “one of my favorite lightning images” and the first “true” cloud-to-ground strike he has photographed. “If you look closely at the river, you can actually see bolts coming back up OUT OF the water, which I’ve never been able to capture before,” he wrote. “Well worth not being able to sleep and getting completely soaked!”
The other strikes I caught in #Pittsburgh before the hail/rain chased me away, incl. a close up of the water strike pic.twitter.com/dOjKG47eJm
— Dave DiCello (@DaveDiCello) May 2, 2016
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