Some lightning photography showing-off

[wfooshee]

One of my favorite natural subjects to photograph is lightning. Lightning at night is easy, as long as you're in a safe place and it's not pouring rain. Having the advantage of being near open water, I often can see storms that are quite distant. I don't have the tools to shoot daytime lightning, but like I said, shooting at night is easy as long as your camera has an intervalometer in the menu system. Set it to take a long-exposure shot every few seconds, leaving about two seconds between ending one shot and starting the next. You get a lot of blank frames, but who cares? It's not like you're burning film or something.

This one I was actually shooting long exposure of the bridge traffic. I'd gone there for lightning but thought I'd missed it.

This one was quite some time back, and I hadn't learned to correct the color, yet, so it's a bit purple-ish.

No bolt visible, but there's an awful lot of zapping up there somewhere!

It's not raining where I'm shooting from, but it's torrential rain across the bay there!

Another, that same night

I almost missed this storm entirely. it was flashing and thundering like the end of the world while I was driving towards this location, and when I got there, it basically stopped. A few small flashes, some not actually in front of me, and most up in the clouds, then I got this one after running the camera for about 30 minutes. The bridge is in exactly the right place, but I've composited a very-long-exposure shot of the bridge from another night, taken from the exact same location, to fill the highway lights.

The lighted pier here is maybe 500 yards from where I'm shooting, and it looks like it's being struck. The lightning in this shot was so far away, though, that the thunder was 35 seconds after the flash. That's about seven miles!

These last few are from the absolutely most perfect lightning storm I've ever come across!! The sky where I was was clear and starry, and you can even see stars above the cloud in some of these shots. It was about 10 or 12 miles away, and very busy; I had something on almost every frame I shot in the half hour I was there!

In this one, that bit of lightning below the cloud is all the people up there saw during the storm, but look how much more there is up high in the clouds! Kind of like an iceberg... They can only see about ten percent of it!

Even when the bolts weren't visible, this cloud was dramatic! And like I said, stars visible above the cloud.

Another "iceberg effect" shot

This one, I just really really like! I'm thinking of having it printed on metal. It almost looks painted, but the only processing I've done is color correction by white balance.

Look for the old man's face in the cloud, top right...

 

[BigOgre]

WOW.

Those are powerful and beautiful and intriguing and so much more.  I took my time and really enjoyed looking at them.  Thanks for posting and also explaining what went on behind the scenes.

 

[dcarver]

That's really good stuff...

 

[FJRBluesman]

That is AWESOME! Great job! Thanks for sharing.

 

[two_wheeled]

This is really cool.  Very well done.  I really enjoyed these.  I've always wanted to take my camera out and do this.  We can get some pretty good lightning & thunder storms in Arizona.

 

[SacramentoMike]

Good ****.  I grew up in upstate NY and the main thing I miss from that time is WEATHER!  Dramatic clouds, snow in its many forms, and thunder and lightning.  Constant overcast and stifling humidity, not as much.  But seriously, absolutely clear blue skies (and heat) for months at a time get damn boring.  Thanks for the look.

 

[philter]

Thanks, they were all great, those last two sent a shiver down my spine. 

 

[Toter]

Great captures! Can you tell us a little about the equipment you used. I have done a lot of basketball photography and a few moon shots. Having to set the white balance for each gym was a normal setup routine. And moon shots require daylight WB, since it is in fact, reflected sunlight. Curious about the white balance used for lightning. Tungsten or incandescent maybe? Any trouble experienced with sensor heat buildup? You certainly get some great light shows. The first shot is amazing due to the stillness of the water in the bay with such a storm nearby! What software did you use to build your composite images. I use Lightroom, but I don't believe it has this capability.

Ed

 

[wfooshee]

My cameras are Nikons, a D7000 and more recently a D7200, and using my ancient kit 18-55 lens, old enough to not even have VR in it. I don't worry about white balance until I get on the computer and then correct it in Photoshop, basically randomly sampling the grays until I pick one that gives the image a non-blue, non-brown hue. Temperature too low will show as bluish or violet, to high will show as brownish or yellow. A lot of lightning posts I see from friend on Facebook are in that brown-to-yellow category, and my first bridge picture above is such, while the next one is too far blue. Auto-WB just won't cut it. You can get close by manually setting WB in the 3500-3800 range.

I'll generally set for ISO 400, f:8, and set the shutter for anywhere from 8 to 15 seconds. I'll put the intervalometer on an interval 2 seconds longer than my shutter. I initially tried 1 second, but sometimes the buffer wasn't finished when it was time, the shutter didn't open, but the timer still counted the next frame's schedule, so I had a long non-exposure; two seconds between frames fixed that. No fractional seconds in my timer menu...

You also have to turn off what Nikon calls "Long exposure noise reduction," not sure what Canon calls it. When that's on and you have a shutter longer than whatever the camera calls "long," when the shutter closes it will immediately take another exposure of the same length with the shutter closed. Anything that's not black on the second frame is obviously noise, and the camera digitally removes that from the first frame. You don't get maximum shooting time with that enabled, obviously, with the shutter closed more than half the time you're out there. The noise isn't enough to really worry about in newer cameras anyway, so having the shutter closed 6 seconds every minute is way better than 36 seconds every minute!

Manual focus, and I find something way out there that I can look at, zoom in on in Live View, and carefully adjust the focus and lock it. This part is the weakest area of my kit lens, as the manual focus ring turns less than 90 degrees for its entire range, so blowing on it too hard will send it way out of focus!

Then I just aim and start the interval timer, when I get a flash or two I stop the timer and check exposure and focus, adjust till I like it, and then let it rip.

Like I said, I'm not too worried about white balance while shooting, because shooting RAW, it's easy to fix in post. You can fix one frame in Photoshop and then copy that setting to the rest of them in Bridge. (If you think Bridge is some weird superfluous thing that nobody needs, go into it and learn what it can do.

The compositing was done in Photoshop. Lightroom lets you "develop" an image from the camera file, but cutting, pasting, assembling, and all of that needs Photoshop. Frankly, Photoshop can do with an image anything Lightroom can do, although probably not in as straightforward a manner. I don't use Lightroom, but that's probably because I grew up on Photoshop, all the way back to before it was Photoshop; I actually started with Aldus Photostyler, which Adobe bought and incorporated into their product.

Here's the bridge lightning shot that actually happened that night, and the long-exposure shot of the bridge that I had from some time before. I basically took just the roadway and light poles from the bridge picture and placed them into the lightning picture to get what I showed above, and since the bridge picture wasn't as much of the bridge as in the lightning picture, there was a crop done as well. (For more showing off, notice in the bridge picture that I've removed the  power lines. )

         

 

[Bounce]

Very nice. Frame worthy. Thanks for detailing your settings. My last foray into more complex shots was the 2017 solar eclipse. Like you said... lots of frames shot and then composited in post.

 

[someguy]

amazing work!!!!!!!

 

[1911]

Wow! Can anybody point to a ytube channel or other website to start learning how to do this kind of stuff without paying a college tuition?

 

[dcarver]

1911, your pics are great the way are.. If you make them better... I can't imagine how good they will be...

 

[1911]

This lightning/low light stuff is a whole new ball game. I started looking into star trail pix and got distracted soon after loading basecamp with dark sky poi. How many pursuits can a man have? I’d like to add photography as another hobby but I’ve got to get back to working on my PHD .......the fence needs work and my PHD has a broken shear pin......damn roots

 

[wfooshee]

He said star trails... heheheh