July 2015 Storm: "Alien v. Predator"

Robert Gregory Garfinkle
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July 2015 Storm:
July 2015 Storm: "Alien v. Predator"

This photo was taken at a distance of 38.5 miles from my location (radar indicated).

I setup my gear in the parking lot of the local fire station (thanks to the Libertyville fire station #3 crew), aimed at the heart of this storm, way, way off in the distance.

It was one of those storms of mystery, which was comprised of a tall thundercloud, bolts of lightning were being tossed about within the cloud at high frequency, and of course, no thunder. It was like an excerpt of Greek mythology playing out before me (in my mind anyway).

Even stranger, the thundercloud did not have any forward motion for close to an hour. It just sat in one spot, spitting lightning bolts very fast.


Photographer's Note:

This was great. Perfect actually, being able to compose the shot once, and keep taking photos.

It was the very first night I took a different approach at lightning capture. Yes, I kept the shutter open, like many photographers would, right? I used bulb mode. I made it a point to never keep the shutter open for more than 10 seconds (roughly). When time passed the 10 second marker I would close and reopen the shutter whether lightning happened or not. A very short duration. if during the 10 second session when lightning happened, I immediately closed the shutter and started a new 10 second session.

This allowed me to take nice portraits, capturing a single bolt of lightning per image. The clouds also retained detail / structure.

Historically, in my attempts to capture lightning, I essentially did the spray-and-pray method. Don't get me wrong, I did capture a few decent keepers, but my camera got abused pretty bad. Camera Abuse? Yeah, I had one session where I rifled off 14,000 photos in less than two hours. I had to stop the capture session to empty my SD Card. So, in my first attempts to capture lightning that summer (2011), I must have put 21k shutter actuations on my D7000. 99.999% had blank (black) frames OUCH! Imagine sifting through those images. I only yielded 5 keepers. That's too expensive. Poor camera!!

With the new approach, the night this photo was captured, I only took 308 photos, and walked away with about 148 lightning strikes. Radically different.

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Taken on: July 17, 2015
Groups appears in:   • Brain Vision. Art.   
Camera: Nikon D810, f/5.0, 4.5 sec, 150mm, ISO 400 (more info) (hide info)
Camera: Nikon D810
Lens: 150.0-600.0 mm f/5.0-6.3
Aperture: f/5.0
Exposure Time: 4.5
Focal Length: 150mm
ISO: 400
Exposure Bias: 0 EV
Flash: Off, Did not fire
Exposure Program: Manual
Exposure Mode: Manual
Metering Mode: Multi-segment
White Balance: Auto
Gain Control: Low gain up
Saturation: High
Sharpness: Hard
Color Space: sRGB
Software: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic 13.2 (Windows)
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