Lightning from Rims - August 30, 2018
I had to stay fairly late at Rocky Flight Ops for my work study job on the evening of Thursday, August 30. I had been seeing some lighting to the south of Billings while putting airplanes away, and a couple big flashes caught my eye while driving out of the parking lot at around 9:45, so I spontaneously decided to pull over next to Airport Road on top of the Rims and try to take some pictures.
I don't have a tripod (at this point) and so I knew I would need to stabilize my camera in order to get good pictures in the darkness. Fortunately, my car's roof rack works pretty well for propping up the camera, so I parked with my car nose-east (perpendicular to the southern direction in which I wanted to shoot) and did just that. The lightning was fairly sporadic, maybe a flash or two a minute, so I knew I would need a longer exposure to capture the strikes. I set my camera (in Shutter Priority mode) to ISO 100, the slowest possible shutter speed (30 seconds), focused on the city lights, and took several 30-second exposed pictures, one immediately after another, hoping to catch a lightning strike somewhere in one of the 30-second windows. I ended up with several pictures of nothing but city lights because the lightning was sporadic, but eventually got a a picture of a lightning strike, seen below:
I used Lightroom to de-haze a bit, and I think I also reduced the exposure, so the glow from both the lightning and the city lights is even more prominent in the raw photo, such that the entire picture almost looked to be bathed in a glowing purplish-brown haze. I didn't like how purple, glow-y, and slightly blown out the city and lightning were in this picture (the camera automatically set the aperture to f/5.6), so I switched to manual mode, kept the same ISO and shutter speed, but increased aperture to f/16.0 to define the lightning more clearly, both by reducing the glow and blow-out effect, and by increasing depth of field to sharpen the focus of both the lightning and city lights. After many, many more 30-second pictures of just city lights while waiting for a lightning strike, my patience paid off again:
I used Lightroom on this picture to increase the exposure 1.75 stops (this was a balancing act between defining the thinner tendrils of lighting branching off of the main bolt, and not blowing out the bright white lights on the left side of the picture). I also used the de-haze tool, and increased contrast by +10 (per Dave's recommendations for a general baseline raw conversion). This picture turned out much better than the previous one (apparent even right after taking the picture, looking at the raw image in playback on the camera), mainly because I found a better balance between aperture, shutter speed and ISO by using manual mode.
One issue I was not able to fix is what I suspect are lens errors, seen at the top of both images (but far more pronounced in the first image) even with Lens Corrections turned on. I was not able to figure out the cause or solution to this problem, but I suspect more experience with the lens and different techniques will help me to better predict when such lens errors are more likely to occur.
I don't have a tripod (at this point) and so I knew I would need to stabilize my camera in order to get good pictures in the darkness. Fortunately, my car's roof rack works pretty well for propping up the camera, so I parked with my car nose-east (perpendicular to the southern direction in which I wanted to shoot) and did just that. The lightning was fairly sporadic, maybe a flash or two a minute, so I knew I would need a longer exposure to capture the strikes. I set my camera (in Shutter Priority mode) to ISO 100, the slowest possible shutter speed (30 seconds), focused on the city lights, and took several 30-second exposed pictures, one immediately after another, hoping to catch a lightning strike somewhere in one of the 30-second windows. I ended up with several pictures of nothing but city lights because the lightning was sporadic, but eventually got a a picture of a lightning strike, seen below:
I used Lightroom to de-haze a bit, and I think I also reduced the exposure, so the glow from both the lightning and the city lights is even more prominent in the raw photo, such that the entire picture almost looked to be bathed in a glowing purplish-brown haze. I didn't like how purple, glow-y, and slightly blown out the city and lightning were in this picture (the camera automatically set the aperture to f/5.6), so I switched to manual mode, kept the same ISO and shutter speed, but increased aperture to f/16.0 to define the lightning more clearly, both by reducing the glow and blow-out effect, and by increasing depth of field to sharpen the focus of both the lightning and city lights. After many, many more 30-second pictures of just city lights while waiting for a lightning strike, my patience paid off again:
I used Lightroom on this picture to increase the exposure 1.75 stops (this was a balancing act between defining the thinner tendrils of lighting branching off of the main bolt, and not blowing out the bright white lights on the left side of the picture). I also used the de-haze tool, and increased contrast by +10 (per Dave's recommendations for a general baseline raw conversion). This picture turned out much better than the previous one (apparent even right after taking the picture, looking at the raw image in playback on the camera), mainly because I found a better balance between aperture, shutter speed and ISO by using manual mode.
One issue I was not able to fix is what I suspect are lens errors, seen at the top of both images (but far more pronounced in the first image) even with Lens Corrections turned on. I was not able to figure out the cause or solution to this problem, but I suspect more experience with the lens and different techniques will help me to better predict when such lens errors are more likely to occur.
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