Sun Dogs and Lightning Strikes

As a writer, I try to present a groundswell of movement in my work, whether it be fiction or non-fiction. Since my last post was rather serious, a little mood lightening seems in order.
These two sets of photographs were taken on August of 1997 and February of 2008. Both photos are multiple images - put together in Photoshop, but the pictures of the lightning began their lives as slides.

For the 1997 panorama, we were camping at a lake near Cardston, Alberta. The night was unusually calm, but not across the water. If memory serves, my exposures were in the neighbourhood of 60 seconds each and I used four images to make the finished scene. An hour after packing up my tripod, the wind came up and blew so strongly that the next morning we packed up our wet stuff and relocated to a more protected campground about 30 kilometres away. Oh the memories!

As for the sun & sundogs, the ambient temperature was around –25 Celsius (-5 Fahrenheit) and I was heading south in my semi, after just unloading some grain. Some who view this photograph may think that the giant rainbow-like circle is lens flare, but not so. Except for a bit of flare over top of the snow, what I actually saw was perfectly captured by my faithful camera. Sundogs occur on cold days when there is moisture in the atmosphere for the sun to reflect off of. As the light bounces through the moisture, the effect is similar to a rainbow. Usually, sundogs are not seen in pairs, nor are they normally so large.