If you want to get a good shot of lightning, it helps to have an amazing sense of timing. Barring that, you could just fake it by creating an entire miniature lightning storm that looks impossibly real, and shooting that instead. Same difference.
Artist and photographer Matthew Albanese has been inventing tiny, mesmerising worlds for years now, and capturing each in killer photos that you can’t help but think are real. This lightning storm is one of Albanese’s most recent creations, with an exceedingly clever trick behind it. That dark and stormy sky? It’s a piece of plexiglass painted black with the bolts of lightning painstakingly etched out so that light can flash through.
It’s not quite as crazy as faking landscapes inside a cloud-tank, but damned if the result isn’t at least as convincing. You can check out more of Albanese’s incredible work at his website. [Flickr via Amusing Planet]