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What was Ben Franklin thinking?
By adamg on Mon, 07/13/2009 - 10:37pm
Matthew I. captured a lightning bolt hitting the Pru early Sunday (looks even more dramatic on a black background).
Copyright Matthew I. Posted in the Universal Hub Flickr pool.
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Comments
What an amazing photo!
What an amazing photo!
I want to take a picture like that
How do one take a picture like that? It is so cool!
I think that the best way is
I think that the best way is to have a camera that lets you leave the shutter open a long time, and use a low ISO. There's very little ambient light, relative to that of lightning bolts.
I suppose that another way would be digital camera that can detect when there was a flash and save the exposure for the period in which it occurred.
More ambient light than you may realize
There's definitely an art to it that I haven't got down. I was trying to shoot the storm, too, at similar shutter speed and f/stop to this photo (I was stopped one ISO speed faster), but all I got was about 500 frames of rubbish. Bright, over-lit, sodium-bulb-orange rubbish. :(
Yeah, might take a lot of experimenting
Options: low ISO, stopped down to small aperture (will put more things in focus anyway), and maybe even ND filters.
Or ...
Wait for one of those afternoon storms :-).
Luckily Matt is nice enough
Luckily Matt is nice enough to allow us to see his SLR settings:
Camera: Nikon D40X
Exposure: 3.5 (sec)
Aperture: f/14.0
Focal Length: 20 mm
Focal Length: 20.0 mm
ISO Speed: 200
Exposure Bias: +5 EV
Flash: No Flash
And there you go.
but wait, there's more . . .
thanks for all these comments everyone! I really appreciate it.
In addition to the EXIF data (posted above by "nice shot Matt" : )), here's a bit more on how I shot this. I quickly set up the tripod, stopped to f/14, set manual focus (on the Pru lights), and then continuously fired off 3-5 second exposures via remote trigger, hoping to capture something. I got lucky! Oh, and simply leaving the shutter open until there is a lightning flash that may be in frame quickly leads to an over (or over-over) exposed shot given how bright the flash is once it strikes (although this is less true if the strikes are much further away and/or less intense). Low ISO is a must (i forgot to check to knock this down to 100).
p.s. Keep trying rsybuchanan! & good luck RhoninFire and neilv if you give it a go
Evil Laugh
BWWAHHAHAHHHAHHHHHAHHHHAAAAAA! Heed my plans for world domination!