Sunshine, lightning and fireworks -- oh my!

Yesterday was probably the most interesting day for the Metro Vancouver area in a long time, due largely to the weather.

Within a single day:

• sunshine
• clouds
• rain
• gorgeous sunset
• thunderstorm
• lightning resulting from thunderstorm; at one point there were about 20 strikes per minute
• annual Celebration of Light fireworks competition (during the lightning)

You don't get too many days like these, that's for sure. Lightning is rare enough here in Vancouver (I think we get an average of 0.2 lightning storms per year), let alone an hours-long lightning storm like we did last night.

I also found out that taking photos of lightning is extremely hard. Eventually I ended up just holding down the shutter button and letting 'er rip until the memory card ran out of space. But getting soaked in the torrential rain was worth every penny.

Here are the shots that I did get (for larger pics, see my Flickr):








Here's a time lapse of the day as seen from downtown Vancouver, courtesy of KatKam:



And it's interesting how nobody reacted to the fireworks competition (as they normally do) but went "OOOOH AHHHH" at the accompanying lightning instead:



Who knows when Vancouver will ever see a fireworks display during a lightning storm again.