I was sitting in the car, watching the storm and trying to capture some video of it with the camera handheld and balanced on top of the window glass in torrential rain when we saw the lightning flash near the power pole. It was clear on playback that the camera had captured something, but it was not until I pulled a single frame from the video that I could see what was there. Processing in GIMP brought out much more detail, but unfortunately revealed some video pixellation. The thunder followed the lightning flash 15 seconds later, placing the strike at 5 km from us. Interestingly, the D800 captured the strike as three distinct static clicks on the audio track, one very loud one as the flash was seen, followed by two quieter ones that were both accompanied by some brightening in a band across the sky.

Nikon D800, Nikon 50 mm f/1.4 prime lens

Frame captured from video with Videopad. Crop, adjust curves and colour balance in GIMP.