Looking at and thinking about lightning strikes

 I captured some lightning strikes on video, it was neat to look at the individual frames and observe the qualitative standard progression of how they work.

To start, here's the video of the lightning strike - probably best to watch at 0.25 speed after watching at normal:

Now I'll walk through the frames of the strike.  

01 immediately before any indication of lightning

02 initial strike

An initial strike that "paves the way" for a bigger strike.  The idea is that this initial strike ionizes the air, turning it into a plasma, in which the molecules in the air have been ionized, so there are now additional free electrons, and the molecules themselves are now ions that aid in the conduction of electricity.  Also notice that the branching occurs from right to left.  I believe this indicates the direction of propagation (from right to left) even though we don't have distinct frames showing this progression.

03 the big strike

Clearly there is a large bright area in this image that matches up with the path of the initial strike in 02.  I'm not sure in this frame if the path of the lightning is actually represented by everywhere that is glowing in this image, or if that is due to the sudden very dramatic increase in brightness.

04 immediately after the big strike

After the big strike the original pathway is now visible however the branches are gone.  This would seem consistent with the idea that the big strike chose one branch and followed that, and we are now looking at the after glow as the plasma recombines and cools off.  Comparing this frame with 02 we can see some fairly large "branches" as well as many / all of the smaller branches are gone.

05 continued fading of the path

06 continued fading of the path

07 continued fading of the path

08 continued fading of the path

Here's a video of another lightning strike I captured:

Below are the frames - the initial frames tell a remarkably similar story to the first strike described above. It gets a little more complicated after that as it then seems like a subsequent strike to ground partly uses the path of the initial horizontal strike.