Another Hobby.. Lightning Storms

[Shep1478]

So besides playing around with my tractor, I'm a weather nut and a photographer. A few weeks ago, we had some serious storms roll through North Georgia. My weather alert went off around 2:30am so I checked the radar and storms were blowing up in the Chattanooga area moving south east towards us. Grabbed the camera and made my way out to the back pool deck. 20 min's later, some of the most wicked lightning I had seen in years was on top of us. Two strikes hit my ham radio tower.

I popped 146 pictures, saved 5 of the best and published 2 serious contenders and one that would have been a great pic, but the Lightning Strike antenna is in the way.

Enjoy!

 

[bxray]

Nice bolts of lightning.

I want to get one of these and go out shooting.

https://plutotrigger.com/products/pluto-trigger


Ray

 

[Jon Sanders]

Beautiful - do you capture using a long exposure? The lighted foreground makes me think that.
I presume you shoot manual? What aperture/speed/ISO get the best results?

 

[LwhiteAH64]

Nice shots!!! Being down in central Florida, we get quite the light shows here too.

 

[CaveCreekRay]

The electrical activity seems markedly more pronounced.

We had a storm Tuesday night that was loads of chain lightning with cloud-to-cloud as well as cloud-to-ground intermixed. I was just pulling up the National Weather Service Radar when a big thunderclap went off out north of my place.

Then the big one...

A second boomer went off, louder than the first and the rumble did not diminish for almost 45-60 seconds. It just kept on going and going and going... It sounded like an F-15 in my driveway, in afterburner, chained down for an engine run.

I ran to the back yard and heard the last half of it. It sounded like a huge earthquake. My wife was on the local FakeBook chat forum and people were commenting on how incredibly long that boom was. Wish I had recorded it. One neighbor suggested that, if there is such a thing for thunder, that was a once-in-a hundred-year thunderclap.

Update: Local TV reported for last night (the night after the big BOOM), 40,000 cloud to cloud and 6000 cloud to ground strikes recorded in a 12 hour period.

 

[Shep1478]

Nice bolts of lightning.

I want to get one of these and go out shooting.

https://plutotrigger.com/products/pluto-trigger


Ray

Ray.. I have the Miops system for my camera. Never used the Pluto, but I assume it works the same way. For these shots, I didn't use the Miops; I use it for daytime lightning though and it works pretty well!

Jim

 

[Shep1478]

Beautiful - do you capture using a long exposure? The lighted foreground makes me think that.
I presume you shoot manual? What aperture/speed/ISO get the best results?

Hey Jon.. Yea these are all manual mode, also shot in RAW format.

For these, I was shooting a Nikon D3s with 10 second exposures at f/7.1. ISO was 400. I set my Kelvin temp to 5500 or so. I kept it low and "cool" like that so I could manipulate the warm tones easier from within Lightroom.

 

[bearbait]

Beautiful, thanks for sharing

 

[WFM]

I agree, Great Photos, Thanks for sharing. And please share more soon.