Stormage!

Tuesday evening saw some pretty impressive storms roll through the region. Unfortunately I could only dedicate about 20 minutes to photographing their approach before we were overcome by strong winds, rain and hellishly close lightning!

These storms led to Wagga experiencing its wettest November day on record and also resulted in the wettest November recorded.

How to Shoot Lightning

Lightning in the hills West of Wagga Wagga 9/11/2011

So last night we had a half decent light show; the first of the season however fleeting it was. And while I was standing out on the side of the road, swatting the occasional mozzy and listening to the rolling waves of thunder, a comment from another weather enthusiast was on my mind: "I wish I knew how to photograph lightning..."

Well, what an excellent topic for a blog!

The thing about lightning is that it happens quickly, damn quickly. Occasionally you'll be lucky to get a storm that produces pulsating lightning (where the bolt travels from the cloud to the ground a number of times) and when this happens you almost have a shot at reacting fast enough to capture it just as you would any other scene.

But these are rare occurences and certainly in my time it has not happened more than once or twice. So we need other methods to try and capture these fleeting demonstrations of Mother Nature's power.

Essentially there are two methods: a lightning trigger and long exposures (you can read about exposures here).

Lightning triggers - and I won't go into the electronics because I wouldn't have the foggiest - work by sensing the pulse of light and relaying a signal to the camera. These are almost essential for capturing lightning during bright daylight conditions (the above photo, although it appears to be during the day, was a 15s exposure. So the scene, to the naked eye was actually quite dark) unless you are willing to fire away like a machine gunner under attack and hope that you catch one by fluke. Now for most people (including myself) a lightning trigger, which can set you back as much as $400, is simply not worth the few occasions a year you might actually get a chance to use it. That leaves us with long exposures...

Lightning over Coolamon - luck of the Irish!

For a long exposure to work (and I'm probably suggesting anything over 5 seconds, depending on how frequent the lightning is) it needs to be fairly dark. Of course you could stop down your appeture, thereby restricting the amount of light that gets through, but this will really limit you to close up lightning; probably too close for comfort! Ideally you want to be working with appetures f/8 and under.

In terms of exposure, you want to start thinking about trying to get 5s or longer. Once it gets really dark - as in during the night - if you want any chance of capturing a bit of detail in the foreground or  the clouds you're also going to need to start looking at exposures longer than 30s. For this you will need a camera that has a "bulb" option for the shutter. This allows you to hold open the shutter indefinitely. Of course you won't be able to physically hold down the shutter button indefinitely, so to overcome this problem you need to get yourself a suitable remote. This can be anywhere from $10 for a grey import through to a couple of hundred for a genuine fully featured remote. This will also solve blur issues of handling your camera while the shutter is open.

Now with long exposures comes the need for a solid rest for your camera; a tripod is an absolute must. You can pick up a great one for under $200 and for anyone serious about photography, they're simply priceless.

The toughest part of all this (not an issue during the day) is focusing. I've had many a rip-snorting lightning strike ruined because I hadn't yet got the focusing spot-on. Of course your best bet is to hope that there are some lights on which to focus at about the same distance from you as the lightning, but in the rural and regional areas this can be pretty tough to find. If you don't have any lights or objects on which to focus, you can try focusing to infinity (a symbol like an 8 on its side) and then bringing the focus back just a tad, taking a photo and checking it out (again, the beauty of digital!) before adjusting it and repeating.

One little trick is to - during the day - grab your lens and a whiteout pen and make some very small marks on the barrel of the lens and the focus ring (if you have a lens with no markings and making sure you don't gum up the lens) at varying distances. The distances vary from person to person and personally I have just one that corresponds to lightning ~40km away on my common landscape lens. You can then use that during the night to arrive at the correct focus sooner, minimising the number of superb strikes that you miss out on while getting the focus right.

So that is pretty much it; all you have to do now is wait patiently for a storm in the right spot, at the right distance and without rain effecting you to give it a go - and that happens all the time doesn't it?!

One quick note on safety though: lightning is deadly and unpredictable. A bolt can strike tens of kilometres ahead of, to the sides or rear of a thunderstorm. There are no real rules for lightning, it will hit high points, it will hit low points and it can just as easily hit you if you're too close. Keep in mind too that you will probably be running around with a long metal pole (your tripod) so just keep your distance and don't be afraid to pull back if you think it's getting too close.

Be prepared for disappointment: in a small version this
doesn't look too bad, but unfortunately the focus is way
out, ruining an otherwise terrific lightning shot!

Expose Yourself!

Ever wanted to get that little bit more oomph out of your shots, to get rid of those bleached highlights or murky shadows? Chances are its the exposure letting you down. So grab your camera, read on and be prepared to expose yourself!

Expsoure is the coming together of two wonderful things: shutter speed and appeture. Oh and a  third, minor hanger-on'er: ISO. What are these mysterious terms I hear you ask? Well, here it is broken down really quick...

The shutter is the click we here when we hit the shutter button; it is essentially how long the camera "sees" for. The faster the shutter speed the less light that enters the camera, the longer the more light. Why is this important? Well if you want to capture something like the movement of the ocean or the blinding strike of lightning then you need a loooong shutter speed. If you want to capture something that might happen in the blink of an eye or is moving really fast like a droplet of milk frozen mid air (it's far more beautiful than it sounds!) or the plume of a smoke stream then you need a really fast shutter speed to freeze the action. The shutter speed is measured in whole or fractions of a second eg 30s, 1/30s, 1/4000s, etc.

The appeture essentially mirrors the role that your iris (the coloured bit of your eye) plays in controlling the size of your pupil. The larger the appeture the more light is allowed through and logically the smaller, the less light. The appeture must be balanced with the shutter to allow for the correct exposure and there's a number of combinations that will result in a good exposure. Just as with the shutter, the appeture has an effect on the image: the larger the appeture the shallower the depth of field (ie less of the image is in focus), the smaller the appeture the deeper the depth of field (ie more of the image is in focus). Appeture is measured or referred to by the "f stop" number and just to confuse you a bit more, the smaller the number the bigger the appeture: f/1.8 (big hole), f/32 (small hole).

And a quick mention of ISO: this is the sensitivity of the sensor in your digital camera (or film in your coal fired, steam powered film camera!). The lower the number the less sensitive the sensor or film and the finer the quality of the image. The higher the number the more sensitive and the noisier or grainier the image.

Really that is it in a nutshell. There's probably just a couple more tips that might come in handy:

• A slow shutter speed will capture movement in a scene, but it will also capture movement of the camera itself. If you want to slow it down, make sure you have a steady rest like a tripod.
• If you read or hear about "stops" that is referring to, I guess what you could call a unit of exposure. One stop is the doubling (or halving) of either the shutter speed or appeture. If you have an exposure of 1/60s @ f/8 and you increase the exposure by a stop you end up with either 1/30s @ f/8 (careful of camer-shake!) or 1/60s @ f/4
• If you want to play around with trying to capture lightning or star trails (both of which usually requiring exposure in excess of 30s) then you're going to need a camera with a "bulb" function. This allows you to hold open the shutter indefinitely (well as long as your batteries will last) and unless you want to test out the stamina of your index finger, you'll also need some sort of remote.
• If you can't adjust the appeture and shutter speed on your camera (and with many point and shoot style cameras you can't) you can still control the overall exposure by utilising exposure compensation. This allows you to increase or decrease the exposure in set increments. The classic example of where this can be very useful is where you're taking a photo of someone against a really dark background and your first image comes out with the person really, really light; washed out and without detail. The exposure compensation allows you to force the camera to reduce the exposure, thereby getting a nicely exposed image of your BFF!

From here my suggestion is to play around and experiment with whatever settings you have available. After all that is one of the great benefits of digital; the results are always immediate!

Lightning over Junee. Two critical aspects to this exposure:
the shutter speed was in excess of 30s to give me the
best opportunity to capture the intermittent lightning, and an
appeture value large enough (small number remember!) to allow
the light from the lightning through.