The Sky is Still Blue

So, before I would bore you with sunset after sunset from my deck.

Now it looks to be storm shot after storm shot from the patio.

Rained off and on, so I tried my luck again.

Now, the trick here is that there is a lot of light around. It's an apartment complex and there's a giant airport a couple miles south of me, so there's local light plus lots in the atmosphere.

How do you expose these then?

My first thought was to go for long exposures, the lightning would fill itself in sharply. Well, with the heaty, bulby lightning here I had plenty of shots overexposed. Just too much light from the lightning. So you dial down the speed, but then it's harder to catch.

In the end I tried a bunch of different things.
The part that was weird was how blue the sky still was. Like there would be flashes way off, I'd shoot and you'd get these painty blue swaths through the sky.

You forget that when the sun isn't out, it's there just covered by clouds.

You forget that when it's night the sky is still blue, you just can't see it.