kristarella's photoblog

Lightning cracks down

This was taken from the shelter of my balcony last week during a fantastic storm.

It was the only really solid shot I got, a couple of others had faint cracks, and I got one good one at the very corner of a shot. Satisfying to get any at all though. Patience pays off!

I can see a bit of a halo around the trees, I’m not sure whether this is an actually photographic artefact from the lightning or just some dodgy processing. Do you know? Do you know how to fix it?

  • Aperture: ƒ/9
  • Camera: NIKON D50
  • Taken: 14 November, 2008
  • Focal length: 50mm
  • ISO: 200
  • Shutter speed: 8.6s

Comments

  1. My guess would be that the halo-ing is from processing, you’d have to tell us how you processed it, and compare it to the pre-processed image to know for sure.

    Cracker of a shot though, so much detail in all the little cracks of lightning off the sides. If I shot this, pfft I wouldn’t care about the halos, it’s just such a one in a million shot anyway.

  2. Cheers Mat! Yeah, I was happy to come away with this one!

    Meh, hard to tell looking at the orig and the processed where it comes from. I didn’t do much at all, 0.05 contrast and 1.0 definition and bit of levels. Reducing definition might remove it a bit, not sure. It was distracting me was all. 😛

  4. Cheers Sire. Ooh yeah, the thunder was pretty huge. Rather exciting actually. Thankfully the wind wasn’t blowing my way so I didn’t get wet (more importantly my camera didn’t get wet, or maybe a couple of harmless drops).

  5. I’ve been dying to get some lightning shots but as of yet haven’t been caught in a storm. Too damn dry in SA at the moment.

  6. Yeah, the weather has been all over the shop in NSW, but I hadn’t had an opportunity like that one for about a year. Thankfully since then I had read an article about how to get lightning shots.

  8. Haha, yeah it was. I thought it was at digital photography school, but I can’t find it there.

    Well, the gist of it was,

    You need a tripod
    Mid-sized aperture— lightning is bright!
    Put your shutter on something like 10, 20, 30 seconds, or on bulb and you can just hold it for a while and see if any lightning comes
    Keep taking photos until it cracks across your view

    That’s what I did. You can also check out what Mat did in the very same storm.

%d bloggers like this: