Colorado Springs lightning

roakey

I've been working on my lightning images for about a month with some absolutely spectacular failures.

Last week this storm came in and offered the perfect opportunity for me to make a go at it with what I've learned.

The EXIF data is intact. Basically I set the camera up on the back porch on a tripod, set manual focus, no IS and went to live view and focused on some distant lights, left it in live view to minimize mirror bounce and locked the cable release button down and let it shoot 30 second exposures one after the other as the storm raged over the front range.

Then I threw out 95% of the pictures

Here are the four best, though the mustard-colored sky is a bit distracting.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

Roak

Mr Head

I like #3 the best even with the brown cloud. I like the cloud and ground being lit up like a stage.

Richard

roakey wrote: »

Thoughts? Suggestions?

These are very impressive--looks like you learned your lesson well. One suggestion would be to crop off the top to give a pano aspect. There's not much happening there, especially in the first two.

rwells

Cool lightning shots

Colorado always seems to have "intense" thunder storms, especially when your up on a mountain!

bgarland

Cool shots. The yellow/brown clouds probably are due the reflected city light below. You might try cooling down the image by lowering the white balance a bit. Sometimes that mellows the yellow browns and brings out the night blue.

I also agree on the crop suggestion.

Jeroen

Great series! I want to try that one time. Although living in a crowded city will not help me much ;-)
May I suggest a panoramic crop for your photos? And sizing them down a bit might help seeing them a bit better on a 1024x768 monitor, like most people have.

bgarland

Roak, I took the liberty to tweak your shot as an example. I hope you don't mind. This is not perfect but with the original image especially if you shoot RAW you have a lot of control with the WB, reducing the exposure and recovering some of the central lightning that was too hot to see.

Hope this helps.

Roaks Lightning.jpg

roakey

Thank you all for your feedback. Yhea, changing WB and cropping I agree is a must (thank you bgarland for the example tweak, the bluer cast is a huge improvement).

Problem is, I'm an old darkroom guy and I have to find the time to sit down and learn how to do everything I used to do in the darkroom years ago with software now!

Roak

Ps. Perhaps leaving a small, open bottle of stop bath next to the computer for that acrid scent will help in the transition?

bgarland

roakey wrote: »

Thank you all for your feedback. Yhea, changing WB and cropping I agree is a must (thank you bgarland for the example tweak, the bluer cast is a huge improvement).

Problem is, I'm an old darkroom guy and I have to find the time to sit down and learn how to do everything I used to do in the darkroom years ago with software now!

Roak

Ps. Perhaps leaving a small, open bottle of stop bath next to the computer for that acrid scent will help in the transition?

Just don't spill it in your keyboard.

As far as darkroom adjustment tools for the digital age, I am a big fan of Adobe Lightroom. It does just about everything you need for general post processing unless you want get into pixel poking or layers and masking that Photoshop provides.

I probably spend 95% of my PP time using Lightroom and seldom need to use Photoshop. Both are powerful tools. It just depends on if you want to be artistically creative or focus on the darkroom-like photo processing.

roakey

If you don't mind a slight tangent, I used to do a lot of posterization and solarization work using kodalith film (I was exclusively a B&W phtographer back then, but I'm trying to expand into this new-fangled color stuff now ).

What tool would handle posterization and solarization best?

I'm starting out small & simple and have Elements 8 sitting here in a box, waiting to be installed.

Roak

Ps. Here's a sample from a 35mm negative that hasn't see the light of day since about 1980. I just got an CanoScan 8800F and scanned it in and using the ArcSoft software that came with it was able to reproduce a two-tone, 8x10 print I did in College. Works better with three tones, which is what I want to re-create.

Of course, this took me about a minute in ArcSoft's PhotoStudio, and took me almost a week using Kodalith!

bgarland

I am hoping that someone with more experience in this area will jump in but my guess is that Photoshop would be the tool of choice for that kind of artistic work.

Richard

roakey wrote: »

What tool would handle posterization and solarization best?

I agree with bgarland. Photoshop has posterization filters, and solarization is easily accomplished with a U-curve.

concord977

Beautiful.

Why, oh why can't I get lightning into my camera?

geoaskier

I lived at 9,000 ft alt. in the mountains above Boulder for 22 years....I know how bad lightning can get there....These are tremendous shots!

Photog4Christ

These are awesome shots! When I lived in COS I used to park off of Mesa Road and watch the storms.