April, week two:
There was a thunderstorm that started less than an hour after the "night photography" challenge started on DPChallenge. I went on to my balcony and tried to start taking some shots. It was hard to time it right, and out of a few dozen images only two or three turned out decent. This is my favorite. I learned a lot about timing lightning strikes, and am looking forward to future opportunities. Unfortunately, since I was in my apartment complex, the lights in the parking lot didn't allow the dark background that I needed to do very long exposures and still have decent contrast. The longest exposure I could get in this setting without the background looking too bright was about 2 seconds... so, most images had no lightning. Here's one that showed some of the nice dendritic branching that I was hoping to capture. I wish there were more lightning storms around here.
For the processing, after a simple b+w conversion I adjusted the levels to darken the sky a little. Resizing, sharpening, and then I went with the asymmetric (top/bottom) border again... this time to compensate for the wide crop ratio that I was forced to use.
Image details:
Date and location: 4/4/7 at 01:01 EDT, my balcony, Charlottesville, VA
Equipment: Canon 30D, 17-85mm IS lens, Hoya SMC UV filter
Settings: 17mm, tripod, ISO 100, f/4.0, 2.0 sec, shot in raw
Processing: cataloged in Aperture v1.5.2 -> export as tif to PS7 -> monochrome mixer (0, 100, 0, 0), -> crop -> levels (0-222) -> resize -> USM (300%, 0.5, 0) -> border + text ->save as .jpg
Photo-a-week goals addressed: #1 (b+w), #6 (extended exposure), #7 (night photography), #10 (landscapes)
3 comments:
Great shot. Photographing a lightning storm is still on my list of things to do. I'm jealous ;)
I think you did really well. I don't see much lightening in my part of the world, so I'll just have to enjoy yours vicariously.
Lovely bolt. Yesterday, I seen a bolt flash right in front of me and I seen the puffs of soot fly outward along its charge. I think that was the closest I have been to one and don't want to be that close again!
to bad I was driving at the moment.
Good capture. They can be difficult to grab.
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