Anyone who follows this blog or my photography knows of my obsession with trying to photograph storms and lightning. Last night I noticed some flashes of light coming from the north side of the house…turned out to be one of the most easily photographed lightning storms I’ve had the opportunity to shoot. It was also one of the creepiest and there was almost no thunder…kind of reminded me of the movie War of the Worlds.

Since the strikes were somewhat predictable (as far as lightning goes) I decided to take a gamble and use my telephoto lens to get in closer. Which made the lightning stikes larger, but it also severely reduced my chances of actually catching a strike in the frame.

Turns out I have become pretty decent at manually focusing my camera in the dark on something that I can’t see!

For a couple years now I have been trying to get a great lightning shot. Every time a storm comes up I get out my photo equipment and sit and wait, hoping to get lucky. I’ve witnessed LOTS of great lightning but the best lightning always seems to happen while I’m adjusting my camera, or in a different direction, or before I get setup.

Saturday night I noticed some lightning so I once again climbed up on my roof to take some shots. This photo is the first shot I took… good, but it still isn’t the great shot that I know is out there just waiting for me to grab. Plus the camera was zoomed way out so I had to crop about 80% of the frame. After I took this shot I made some adjustments and as I was doing so, “THE” shot happened, but as usual my shutter was not open. Sigh…I feel a bit like the coyote trying to catch the road runner. Nevertheless, the quest for ‘the shot’ carries on.

On a side note, does anyone else think this looks photoshopped? It isn’t. The only thing it’s missing is a cheezy wolf superimposed with some mountains in the background.

I was up late last night sorting through all the pics that yesterday’s storm provided. So I finally narrowed it down to just 2 that I will post here. There was another one that would have been cool, but I moved the tripod during the exposure, so it was blurry.

I decided it’s kind of harder to photograph lightning during the day because it’s hard to keep from overexposing the image. Also, I missed the best lightning strike of the whole storm while I was fidgeting with the tripod leg. Never did get that ‘exceptional’ lightning pic that I’ve always hoped to get, but i still got a few good ones.

Enjoy!

-click for larger version-

-click for larger version-

I really liked the tv show Firefly. What I also really like is real fireflies. I will admit that most bugs tend to give me the creeps, but luminescent beetles really fascinate me. I think they are awesome and I could sit out back for hours and watch them.

This scene plays out about this time every year. I forget about it until one night I walk out to the garage and notice the entire river valley is flooded with bright green pulses, indicating the bugs are ready for some mc-lovin’. It is easily one of the most magical things that happens around the farm. I attempted, with mild success to photograph this annual spectacle last year but this year I made some forward steps with my firefly photo skillz and attempted to add in the element of actual lightning from a distant thunderstorm as a backdrop to the lightning bugs.

Photographing lightning bugs is somewhat difficult because they aren’t exceptionally bright, so you have to use high ISO and as wide an aperture as possible…because a long exposure alone won’t work since they move and blink. Photographing lightning is difficult because it’s unpredictable…I have found the best settings to be a low ISO and long exposure. Combining the high ISO for the bugs with a long exposure for the lightning isn’t exactly a recipe for a quality photograph and light in the sky begins to show up… in this case I was fighting with the glow of what I assume was Pittsburg, KS but eventually found a good angle where the glow wasn’t in the shot.

After about an hour with nothing to show, I suddenly remembered that I have a macro lens with a max aperture of f/2.8, much wider than the f/5.6 my everyday lens was giving me and it might actually work for this application. This let me knock the ISO setting down a good 6 steps and turn off the noise reduction setting – allowing me to take shots much more rapidly. The only limiting factor was that this lens has a fixed 100mm focal length, so wide shots are out of the question. Another thing I tried was shooting in RAW format. Supposedly RAW captures more detail and range, but the only thing I could tell for sure was that the files were huge, about 12mb each.

The lightning was far away, somewhere in the vicinity of Emporia, KS. So it wasn’t big, bright, and spectacular but it was all I had to work with. Given the various factors I was ultimately pleased with what I came up with. After about 2 hours of walking around in wet knee-high grass and about 100 mosquito bites I finally captured two shots that I like.