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gallowsroad
join:2004-08-09
Kansas City, KS

1 recommendation

gallowsroad to EGeezer

Member

to EGeezer

Re: Post your weather pictures here

said by EGeezer:

The lightning shot taken at 1/30th of a second was fantastic good fortune.
Image stabilization is your friend.

A comical note about that lightning. I pushed the aperture to force a slower shutter speed in hopes of getting a lightning shot, but was shooting in RAW, and my cam will not shoot in Drive mode in RAW format, only jpg. So I was shooting single frames.

Thinking I was missing out on the lightning I switched to jpg, and using drive mode shot over 100 frames while watching lightning bolts drop from the sky within the camera's field of view.

After all that, the first, single RAW shot was the only frame that had a lightning bolt visible in it and I didn't know that until I downloaded the photos later on. It isn't a fantastic lightning shot (there are far better to be found on the Gallery pages here and all over Flickr, for example) but it's what I got that day.

Pure, blind luck.

Axilla
Finger, Finger

join:2001-03-26
Schofield, WI

Axilla

From what I have been told by a gentlemen that does a lot of weather photography. He closes down his aperture a lot then uses an extremely long exposure time.

The link below shows the results.
»www.wxnut.net/storms.htm

He says he has a lightening trigger as well, but doesn't get as good a result with it.
gallowsroad
join:2004-08-09
Kansas City, KS

gallowsroad

Member

said by Axilla:

From what I have been told by a gentlemen that does a lot of weather photography. He closes down his aperture a lot then uses an extremely long exposure time.
Great photos!

I did close down the aperture as much as I could, but it was the middle of the day and I was standing in bright sunlight shooting into the storm, so getting truly long exposures wouldn't have been possible without a filter of some sort. That's why I gave up the single shots and tried to capture lightning with the drive mode turned on, figuring that with all the lightning my eyes were seeing, a hundred exposures ought to catch *something*.

They didn't.

Axilla
Finger, Finger

join:2001-03-26
Schofield, WI

Axilla

I haven't completely picked this guys brain yet so there may be more to it.

I really never have tried to capture lightening yet, but well, it does travel at the speed of light.