Well Gary is was worth to make 100 shots, this one is excellent.

There is a bit of visible noise in the sky area, but otherwise it is quite well exposed and makes a great shot. I wonder how you took the lightning - I take it the lightning came across while the camera was still "exposing". This kind of shots take some patience, I guess.
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The noise is really jpeg compression artefact as I have compressed these quite a bit for web display.
The original was taken at 50 ISO in RAW mode.
As for capturing the lightning, I tried my best to capture as soon as I saw lightning but always missed it, so then decided just to tediously take 10-15 sec exposures with noise reduction on (which doubles the time taken) followed by the usual 13sec RAW write time, then a clean of the lens to remove raindrops before taking next photo...so average about 1 pic a minute. But unlike film - you know when you get a good one and can go to bed!
Mind you the subsequent storm came from a different direction and hit us hard blowing against the window and causing the roof to leak in a number of spots so didn't get much sleep anyway after that ...but further storm shots impossible.

By the way....the building at bottom left is la Rotunda, part of the famous Bristol which used to be a hotel.
Quite aptly, this building is where Prince shot his music video clip for "Purple Rain" .
It is also where parts of the movie "Dirty rotten scoundrels" was filmed - actually from the room next to where I was staying.

Gary,
I slightly removed the noise in this image without messing up the details. Re-upload it if you want to;

http://myolympus.org/document.php?id=3981

- Sergey

Hi Sergey, thanks but your version seems to have more jpeg compression artefact. I have replaced image with a slightly larger and less compressed version.