Lightning over France from Ramsgate

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Read the behind the scenes story – audio transcribed:

Not long after we’ve moved back to Ramsgate in 2015, it was a really, really humid, heady September day and we were sat with my family and we we were, I think, building furniture that day. So we’d not lived in this house very long and suddenly I thought we, a pane in our conservatory of glass or pane of glass had actually blown up, because it’s this huge flash and I thought it, it just shattered. It was really weird. I couldn’t work out what had happened.

And then it happened again. And then there was that boom of thunder, that boom, that, like, sits in your chest or in your diaphragm, that that core of your being and ripples as it rips through and oh my goodness, it was a lightning, a thunderstorm starting, but it was trying to work out where it was.

And it turns out that it was reflecting a storm. I say it, my conservatory glass was reflecting a storm that was over the channel. And so I had always wanted to capture lightning in a cloud. A lightning strike. So it was like a, an instant like evacuate situation for me. Like, go, go go, get my tripod! Where is it? Get this. Where’s my shutter? Ran down the road to the cliff top. And when I got to the cliff, it was incredible because the storm was actually over France, and we’re maybe only 30 miles away from France here in Thanet. And, the incredible thing about it was that it was quite low on the horizon, maybe only like, I don’t know, 45 degrees up, maybe not even that far, and so above it, you then had still the, the night sky. So it was absolutely full of stars and then these really dark clouds just above the horizon over France. And every time lightning ripped through those clouds, it was lighting everything up so you could see, so much more over that side of the over that coast.

And we watched it for ages and what I love most about it was, I was one of the first people there, but gradually more and more people came to the clifftop and I felt like we were at some kind of festival, like Nature Fest, because everyone was like, woah, wow. So, and one of my neighbours actually Whatsapped me because they live only a couple of doors up from the front and said, I can hear you laughing, she said, I know that’s your laugh and so it was just so fun. I think there must have been 30 or 50 people along the clifftop, all these silhouettes just gasping and like, just in absolute awe of the nature and the storm in front of us.

And I remember chatting to someone who I had met at one of the universities here locally, and she said, I thought I’d see you here with your camera and we were some of the last people to stop watching. And it was so fun because the, the storm, you could see it coming over the channel because it was getting higher and higher in the sky.

The stars disappeared, and it looked like it was maybe passing over more towards Ramsgate than where we were stood and we couldn’t see the harbour, we was like, the harbour’s gone, maybe it’s just going to stay over there. And then suddenly the hailstones and the rain started pouring and washing over us. So it was like snap those tripod legs down and then run as fast as you can home because that storm then absolutely lashed its way through right overhead. And it was just an incredible night. And so this image is from the sort of relative start of the storm when it was over France you can see Calais on the horizon and Dunkirk there and I just love the fact that you can see the stars above it.