Chasing Lightning Sprites: One Photographer's Rare Capture

Sprites exist for less than 20 milliseconds at 50–90km altitude, which means you're not getting lucky with a kit lens and a prayer. What makes this worth reading isn't the image itself but the decision-making behind the capture: where to position, which focal length gives you enough sky, what shutter speed actually catches something that fast, and how many blank frames you're prepared to live with. If you shoot any kind of weather or night work, the patience-to-payoff ratio here is genuinely instructive.