A Night at Lulworth Cove

This evening was spent at Lulworth Cove.
It was not intended to be a proper trip as it's a week-night but the weather was good and it needed to be taken advantage. I relaised I've nto really done much at Lulworth Cove itself. Often at places accessed via Lulworth Cove but not so much the place itself.

One thing I didn't know about Lulworth Cove is that to the right of the cove(West) there are large rock formations jutting out of the sea, so, immediately upon discovering this the first sequence of shots was determined and formed quite the distraction.

Due to the number of images and a couple of animated .gifs I've split this post up.
Please click below to read on...

After a while, once it felt like the sky was dark enough, I wanted to move up to a higher point to see where to shoot next, possibly make use of a stone plague that was placed with some text describing the area but as we were packing up we noticed the whole area seemed to flash.

A couple of times.
We tried to determine the source but eventually just gave up and moved on.

The first shot I lined up was intending just to get the texture and leading lines formed by the steps hopefully drawing the eye to the sky.
Straight away it seemed cloudy but I just wanted to see how the shot came out. I quickly composed the shot and set it running with a long exposure whilst I walked up the steps and had a look out to see. (You'll notice a blurry shadow.)

When I looked out to see however I saw what the flashing was. A distant storm was raging, way out to see, far enough out that we couldn't even hear the thunder strikes but the lightning strikes themselves were lighting up the distant clouds over the horizon.

I quickly re-set-up my camera for a new sequence, I've never shot a storm before and I had a lot of difficulty  getting the exposure right. I was optimistically hoping to get a nice clean fork-lightning strike but it was way too far to get that sort of detail. The best I could get was lit-up clouds.

 However as the clouds cleared and the night wore on the Milkyway poked up and I was quite pleased to get a shot of it with a storm raging below.