Lightning Strike

davidryan

When I see these, my nerves go numb. Caught looking out to my backyard, this strike was one of many that night that brought floods and hail that night. I have a checkered past with lightning. It seems lightning has made a hobby of hitting the planes I fly! Only once, though, did we sustain damage. This strike lit up the sky enough to even see the virga falling from the low clouds.

Maestro

Amazing capture! I have tried in vain to capture lightning. How do you do it?

davidryan

Maestro wrote:

Amazing capture! I have tried in vain to capture lightning. How do you do it?

I have by no means any method. However, I guage the f-stop according to how intense the lightning tends to be (brighter lightning, higher f-stop) and then I'll do a test shot using the bulb setting so as to limit the noise. Then, like last night, I would hold for 10 seconds and let nature do the rest. Sometimes, that split second when I'm in between shots, nature would really let off a nice one. Oh well.... that's my method. Some people will even use light sensitive trigger devices but I don't have that fancy stuff.

Oh and I should mention you have to pretty much guess where the next strike will be. I was lucky that night as this one cloud, moving slowly, had a lot of strikes.

STLMach1

Great looking shot! The color and exposure look fantastic. I'm still trying to "perfect" a method and had lots of time to experiment last night when we were hit with a storm whose lightning lasted for some time. Storm shots are certainly addictive.

Thanks for posting the shot - Michael

gus

nice one david. Moody clouds.

I had to look up virga (we dont use the term over here)...im scratching my head here wondering why you have viagra falling from the sky ..how good is that !

AfterImage

I really like that one!
A strike from Thor's hammer for sure!

System

Maestro wrote:

Amazing capture! I have tried in vain to capture lightning. How do you do it?

I have to ditto maestro i suck at catching .. the strikes ..

davidryan

Sorry Gus...I should have been more specific. I hear the word "virga" a lot but I usually hang out with a bunch of other pilots. If you'd walk into the cockpit and start talking about f-stop, they'd assume you came up with some new landing technique :-) But then again, Viagra falling from the sky might be a lot of fun...HA!

gus wrote:

nice one david. Moody clouds.

I had to look up virga (we dont use the term over here)...im scratching my head here wondering why you have viagra falling from the sky ..how good is that !

davidryan

Another shot
This is an old shot but didn't want to take up space showing in a different thread. This shot was taken in Shreveport LA when I was stationed there for a short time.

davidryan

...and one more
Taken in North Dakota during a tour there...incidently none of the colors of these photos were altered. Differing atmosphere makeup causing the variation in color? Or perhaps lightning intensity. The two blue ones were by far the more terrorizing of all the lightning shots I've caught.