stormy weekend

We had some really active thunder storms roll through the area over the weekend. I lost power 4 times though never for more than a minute or so.

This sequence of photos illustrate my attempts to take pictures of lightning. I spent over 40 minutes doing this. My method was to use a 30 second exposure with my digital camera, handheld, just at any random area of sky. After the exposure, the camera takes 30 seconds to process the shot then I am able to move onto the next exposure.

So it just came down to luck and perseverence. Most of the shots came out like the one below. Nothing. Just dark sky.

However a few times there was lightning behind the clouds so the clouds were lit up but no picture of the lightning. Some of those shots were neat looking--lots of drama!

You might have to click on this shot to enlarge it to see this, but there's a little bit of lightning there in the middle of the picture. Limited success!

Now in this one we get some lightning going sideways. Interesting! The limited lighting effect of the strike allows for more dramatic looking clouds.

Now here's the first picture where I got a decent exposure of some lightning. In a way it's surprising this process works at all since it's so random. Just hold the camera and hope something happens. It's like a shy guy in a singles bar.

This was the most dramatic shot. It's actually two seperate strikes that are combined on the 30 second exposure. As a result it's lit up a little more than I'd like but I didn't want to edit any of these pictures--the only thing I did was shrink them down enough so I could post them.

So that's it. I had over 30 blank pictures and around 8 of dramatic clouds but no lightning and then 4 pics with some lighning in them. Perhaps not a very effective use of time but I enjoyed sitting out there watching the night sky so what the Hell...