I think most of you have seen this image before on my MySpace page. I was reminded of this again this morning when I was woken up by thunder echoing off of the urban canyons of the city. I took this picture from my back porch in Queens last spring. I shot around 60 images. I put my camera on a tripod and left the shutter open for 10 seconds at a time with all the lights out. I did this for about 45 min trying to anticipate a strike. This was the only frame that had something.

Lightning use to scare the daylights out of me. When I was a kid, I couldn't stand it. It scared me to the point where I would be petrified and hide under my bed for hours until the storm had passed. It didn’t rain that often in my hometown as I grew up in a desert, so I was generally ok. It was like this until I was 15 however. Don't ask. When I was about 10 my family and I were visiting my grandparents at their house about a 5 min drive from us. It started out as a nice day, but then, towards evening, the clouds came and the lightning and thunder started in. Midway through, my parents wanted to leave as it was getting late. I wouldn't leave the house to get into the car because I thought for sure the lightning would get me. After much deliberation, basically me screaming hysterically, they decided to leave me there and pick me up the next day.

I was finally cured of this by pure fright. When I was 15 I went to a private school in Wisconsin. No I was a good kid and wanted to go. It was in a small town of about 2500 people along the Mississippi River. I stayed in a dorm with 100 or so other kids and had a roommate from Georgia who could sleep through anything, including his alarm clock most mornings. If you have never lived in the Midwest like I hadn't, I had no idea the thunder and lightning storms could be so intense there... really intense. After about the first week of living there, I was woken up late one night with flashes of light going off about every 1-2 seconds. I thought the Seniors were hazing us with flash bulbs or something, but to my horror, I quickly realized a serious storm was approaching. It moved in fast. I was absolutely in shock by the shear number of lightning strikes and the loudness of the thunder. It shook the whole building. My roommate never woke up… good thing, I guess because he would have seen me lying there fetal with the covers over my head.

After living there for 9 months and having to go through many, many more storms like this, I was eventually cured. There was no place to go and hide during those storms... and besides, I would have been totally humiliated by my peers if they ever found out. Much worse than being struck by lightning at age 15. Now I can even take pictures of it for everyone’s pleasure!

Sometime I'll tell you about why I don't have any mirrors in my apartment except for the bathroom.