ka-BOOM!

linecrew · Post by **linecrew** » Tue Aug 01, 2006 9:00 pm

Freaky lightning shot taken by my buddy in Ottawa Monday night.

Fish · Post by **Fish** » Tue Aug 01, 2006 9:05 pm

Nice shot. Looks like there should have been flames shooting out from where it struck.

linecrew · Post by **linecrew** » Wed Aug 02, 2006 4:18 am

...and another.

Bede · Post by **Bede** » Wed Aug 02, 2006 5:30 am

How did those pictures get taken? Digital/Film?

If it was film, what speed was the film and the f-stop?
How do you do that on a digital camara?

AEROMONKEY · Post by **AEROMONKEY** » Wed Aug 02, 2006 8:25 am

quit askin too many questions...just enjoy the pics

Hedley · Post by **Hedley** » Wed Aug 02, 2006 8:46 am

That's nothing ... at Haza's stag, when the porn flick was on, Bede was continually talking about apertures, endlessly complaining about the lighting, etc. No one understood a word he said.

Haza of course was complaining about the lack of a plot, niss thought it was disrepectful towards women and farm animals, and IABD complained about the wooden acting and lack of character development.

Honestly, it was almost enough to make a guy want to give up porn.

FL410 · Post by **FL410** » Wed Aug 02, 2006 9:52 am

Bede wrote:How did those pictures get taken? Digital/Film?

If it was film, what speed was the film and the f-stop?
How do you do that on a digital camara?

Not too hard to do with a digital SLR. Takes a bit of experimenting, but set the ISO fairly low (ideally 100), set the fstop to something like 8, and then play around with a time exposure of a few secs. The camera will let you know if that length of time will result in under or overexposed pics, so adjust the fstop/time as you see necessary. Or just use bulb mode if your camera supports it - set the fstop and then the exposure time will be as long as you hold down the shutter. Remote shutter release is definitely recommended.

Something like 10 sec exposures are probably good, and given that you are at ISO100 you'll need a longer exposure to get a properly exposed, noise-free pic anyways.

linecrew · Post by **linecrew** » Thu Aug 03, 2006 4:19 am

This is what he wrote back...

I'm using a Canon S1 digital camera in manual mode with 15 second long exposures on a tripod with an aperture setting of 4.0. I'm not super happy with the results but I'm still refining the technique (ie finally reading the damn instruction manual).

I've got a couple more he sent from a storm a few months ago. I can post them if anyone wants to see them too.

frontside_air · Post by **frontside_air** » Thu Aug 03, 2006 7:26 am

Bede wrote:How did those pictures get taken? Digital/Film?

If it was film, what speed was the film and the f-stop?
How do you do that on a digital camara?

lightning is all about getting lucky. you can grab it with any speed film so just set up the same way you would with a dslr. aside from the comments above i'd say- use the same settings as you would if you were exposing the night scene normally but stop it waaay down. you're trying to expose properly to get nice details in the foreground while pretty much just waiting to get lucky with the lightning. the bolts in those pictures are cool but hot (too overexposed, the exif info for those says they were f/5|15s.). if you get this on film you can burn the hotspots in the darkroom but if it's digital there's no information in those regions to recover in processing so you're hooped. to keep that from happening stop down enough so that when you do score a hit it's not blown out and you can see the fine details in the spidering...a good guideline for this is to use a high enough f/stop where you get starbursts on streetlights which will also let you expose longer shutters and increase your chances of grabbing a bolt. of if you're lazy, shoot the foreground scene like a normal night exposure then bulb til you get lightning and layer the two like an HDR in post.

linecrew · Post by **linecrew** » Fri Aug 04, 2006 3:45 am

WOAW!! That's an aweseome picture!!!!!!

snag · Post by **snag** » Fri Aug 04, 2006 6:48 am

It's not too tough. You can get yourself a fancyass camera and get pictures like above, or you can just use your cheapo digital camera. Just set it up on something sturdy, or one of those cheapo little tripods. Put it on the 2 or 10 second timer. Set it up for the longest exposure possible. The ones below were on 15 second exposure. Keep snapping away, all the pictures will be dark (so long as you are doing it at night) unless a lightning strike takes place at any time in the 15 second exposure period. Voila. Oh yeah, and get ready to take lots and lots of pictures. Gotta love digital.