lightning photos
August 1st, 2006
It’s been hot. Really hot. Today the humidex sat well above 40 all day… It’s been like this for a good chunk of the Summer too, though not nearly as bad here in Montreal as it has been for other parts of the world. I’m glad I’m not in those parts.
The one nice thing about this kind of weather is that we’ve been getting some great thunderstorms! Almost every day, in fact. Today I attempted to take some pictures of the lightning. Here’s my best shot: (links to the rest of the album)
I think it’d be a lot easier to take these sorts of pictures with a darker sky. As it was, I really couldn’t manage much longer than 3 second exposures without the sky just turning bright orange, and then the lightning doesn’t really stick out enough. With a darker sky, I could have just left the shutter open for 30 seconds, or even more – it’d be much easier to catch the flashes, and they’d have better contrast. And I wouldn’t have so many useless empty pictures – I took almost 300 pictures tonight, and fewer than 20 had any lightning in them at all! Maybe the next storm will be a bit later at night. During a power failure. We’ll see!
Not bad at all! You can also have a look at my blog which I update frequently on thunderstoms and lightning. This weekend was pretty good! Friday got some cool lightning pictures and yesterday we had a major amount of rain in a very short period of time – 52.5 mm in 40 minutes!
Nice pictures! I particularly like the “good and evil” ones. I don’t expect to see much more lightning here until next Summer, though occasionally a storm will blow in during the winter. It always seems a little out of place in the snow…
We had a fantastic year for lightning this year (or terrible, depending on your preferences!) Several weeks with a storm every night, so that I was just getting used to evening being lightning time.