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July 01, 2006

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While I was outside, taking pictures of the lightning, sometimes the light that the camera would capture was just lightning in the clouds. The faint orange glow to the right is the lights of Tucson in the distance. Although the city and development is continuously heading further out this way, I am fortunate enough to still be far enough out of the city not to be affected by all the lights.

Taking pictures of lightning at night: 
It's actually not as difficult as one might think, and the fact that, in this case, it was so easy it made me sick. But of course as with most nature photography, you still have to be very patient. In this case it was just a matter of pointing the camera at the thunderstorm and taking a picture. Of course the camera, and the various features has a lot to do with it. For this process a slower shutter speed is the most important feature. Since it's dark and at night, leaving the shutter open for long periods of time is great. In my camera it has a maximum automatic shutter speed of 30 seconds. I just click and wait. When the lighting flashes you close the shutter. This is not that much different than capturing lightning with conventional photography. In the very early stages of photography they actually use to do something similar for every shot. With the much slower exposure film back then they would just set the camera up, take the lens cap off and wait, then they would close the lens again after a certain amount of time. There was actually no mechanical shutter. Now in my case in taking pictures of lightning at night I do have to work on my lighting settings within the camera because the other images I took came out way too bright. 

Taking pictures of lighting in daylight:
All I can say is "Fat Chance", and "Good Luck With That". So this might be a little bit more tricky. Because, of course, you cannot leave the shutter open for very long at all. So you have to time it just right to get a shot. And we know how slow human reaction time can be. I mean without super-human, Ninja-quick reflexes, lightning is just a bit faster than we are.
 But technology has provided us with some options and we do have optical and light sensors. There are devices that can detect bright flashes like lightning and can be set up to trip the shutter of a camera upon detection of such bright flashes. 

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