Ian Reed calls himself a “weather geek” and he had been anticipating Saturday afternoon’s lightning storm all day.
A nature photographer, Reed works for the nonprofit Mount St. Helens Institute educating people about the volcano and its impact on the world around it. He positioned himself Saturday to get a good angle on the incoming storm as it rolled in late in the afternoon.
“Once I started seeing flashing on the horizon I knew we were in for a show,” Reed said in an email Monday. “As the storm approached it dropped several gorgeous bolts out ahead of it, and the mountain just so happened to be framed between us and the storm.”
At night Reed uses long exposures to capture lightning bolts. But he took a different approach for Saturday’s daytime storm, setting up his iPhone 15 Pro Max to record video of the storm and lowering the camera’s exposure a bit to account for the brightness of the flash.
He then reviews the footage frame by frame to look for the best shots.
On Saturday, Reed’s camera caught a spectacular moment when a lightning bolt struck a ridge between his position and the volcano. A spark of light ringed the impact point with the volcano looming eerily in the background, partially cloaked in dark clouds.
“We have used spotting scopes to check the location of the strike and haven’t seen any signs of fire,” Reed said. “It was a very wet storm that dropped about 0.75 (inches) of rain, which helped mitigate any fire danger.”
The storm set records in parts of the Portland area. The half-inch of rain that fell in Hillsboro broke a record dating to 1976, while the 0.4 inches recorded in McMinnville tied a record from 1899.
The rainfall also washed out block parties and wedding receptions around the region. Pink Martini postponed its Saturday concert at McMenamins Edgefield in Troutdale until Sept. 7, citing the rain, lightning and thunder.
On Mount St. Helens, Reed retreated to the safety of a building equipped with a lightning rod to ride out the rest of the storm.
“The lightning was constant but with howling wind and sideways rain, there wasn’t much to see besides the constant flickering of light as lightning continued inside the storm,” he said. But Reed posted video of the storm’s early moments on the Facebook page of the Mount St. Helens Science and Learning Center, offering more dramatic views of the storm.
