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Comment by yangyang | Hacker News Reader

I had the same thing happen with one of my photos of lightning in London. I actually thought my shot had been ripped off at first glance, then realised it was from a different angle.

Mine: https://www.flickr.com/photos/beechlights/2739042419/in/phot...

Alternative, from the Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/earth/2515...

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Looks at first sight like much of a bigger coincidence, but given that you probably both used a long shutter speed (yours seems to have been 6s) and selected the nicest of a number of shots, it's not like there are crazy chances against getting two almost identical shots like this.

Oh yeah, I don't deny it isn't insanely improbable. Still, finding same strike in a newspaper, shot from a very similar angle, was quite surprising.

Nice quadruple-negative.

Surprisingly readable!

Actually that could be much more likely if both used automated triggering.

Yep, this is one situation where it's actually reasonable. The fact that they both used automatic triggering, and that took a lot of pictures over the period of the thunderstorm make it realistic. I personally don't believe the man in the article. It's easy to make a second account to pretend to be a different photographer (or have a friend pretend), and equally easy to set up 2 cameras to a trigger. There's a lot of competition in photography now days, so I would not be surprised to discover yet another publicity stunt.

The bolt of lightning is clearly identical, but I'm having a difficult time correlating buildings between the two shots. My guess is they were taken a mile or two apart.

IIRC the other shot is somewhere south of the river. I worked it out at the time. I was near Tower Bridge on the north side.

fwiw, yours is nicer :)

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