ne summer night in 1980, 22-year-old Tom Downey left his house around 1 a.m. to chase a lightning storm with his old 1950s-era press camera. Little did he know, one of the photos he would capture that night would become one of the most famous photographs of western Nebraska landscape of all time.
“It’s pretty (dangerous),” he said. “You have an aluminum tripod and you’re sitting out in the open, and so I don’t recommend it, unless you’re young and stupid — and I was. I was young … you’re kind of fearless.”
Still, Downey at least had some idea of what he was doing. He had just gotten back from his professional training at a photography school in Chicago, and he grew up around photography his whole life.
“We had a studio in Scottsbluff, my grandpa started it 1934 … and my dad and mom were involved in it, and then I came in,” he said. “So, it was a portrait studio and we sold landscape photography too.”
Downey said he’d always had an interest in landscape photography, which is why he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to capture lightning that late summer night over 40 years ago.
Downey grabbed his camera and zipped over to a pasture near the old KOLT radio towers along 20th Street. The storm seemed to be hovering over the Wildcat Hills, he said, so he wanted to keep his distance, but still have an open space to shoot from.
“If the storm is right on top of you, it’s real dangerous, and there’s too much wind. ...You can gauge it — the lightning of the storm — by counting how long it takes the sound (to come) when you see the lightning … but you don’t want to, if the storm is right on top of you, you definitely don’t want to do this,” he said. “Sometimes you can do it safely if the storm is quite a ways away.”
Downey set up his 4 by 5 speed graphic camera on his “real sturdy tripod,” and began adjusting the settings. He set the focus at infinity and used a setting called bulb, or time exposure, which allowed him to use a cable release to keep the shutter open for as long as he wanted. He left it open for 20 minutes.
“You have to give it a chance (for) more than one strike to hit,” he said.
Downey said it helped that there was a lot of sheet lightning, which is lightning high up in the clouds that “lights up the whole way” without exposing the bolts. It was that sheet lightning that helped fill in the foreground of the photo, he said.
“It was a really incredible night and just got the right place, right time,” he said. “…If there’s any kind of wind gusts of any kind, even with a sturdy tripod, over 20 minutes, it will blow your tripod, move it enough, that your picture won’t be sharp. So, you need a pretty calm (environment). This is why it was a really good night. I got lucky.”
Downey took 15 photos that night over the course of several hours. One of the hardest parts of it all, though, was not knowing how the photographs turned out until developing the film the next day.
“In film, you had to take careful notes, use light meters and then hope and pray that you made the right (choices),” he said. “Most of the time it’s just experience.”
Downey made the transition to digital photography in the early 2000s, and he said the advantages of digital photography over film photography are incredible. Yet, it’s still this lightning photo shot on a 1950s-era film camera that remains one of his most popular photos.
Despite his family’s photography studio having closed in 2015, Downey still does photography to this day and remains passionate about the artform.
“I’m still real passionate about it. The tools change; the cameras change and everything, but it’s still finding the image and seeing the image, even with technology the way it is today,” he said. “…You have to kind of be able to have an eye for it and a passion for it. That’s the important thing, and I’m still shooting things today. I’m about as passionate (as), or maybe more than, I was (before).”
You can find more of Downey’s photography at downeyphotography.com.
*Originally published in the Star-Herald on Jan. 2, 2022.
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