Risk & Reward

Return on Investment

When one takes on a task in life, as humans, we always look to analyse the effort and the return.

How can I capture a lightning strike in a photography?

• What is the method?
• What is the setting?
• What is the effort?
• What is the time frame?
• What is the reward?

Lightning Photography (better than sex!)

At the time I lived in an urban townhouse complex, this was within a prime location for thunderstorms and lightning. I would be ready with all me kit to dash into extreme weather conditions just to SNAP that SPECIAL moment in TIME!

Big Bang Flash

Lightning photography is an extremely fine-tuned art, dangerous and together with a mega dose of patience, one stands behind a tripod and camera for hours, focused in a direction you anticipation the lightning.

Incipation plays an important role in being ready to release the shutter.

No pain, no gain

So this image in question (above) was taken at 20:12 on evening during a thunder storm. The for was at a fair distance from my location.

To get a clear view and framing the image correctly, I walking into the grass field across the road from where I lived. In pitch darkness, aided by some street lighting and my mobile phone flashlight, I found level ground. While moving around setting up my equipment, I stood on a broken glass bottle. It was sore and I knew it was bleeding. Grinning and bearing the pain, as was not going to miss this beautiful opportunity capture some excellent images.

I notice that the storm was heading in my direction as the time gap between thunder and lightning strike started getting shorter in duration. Within a few seconds, having the wind driving the storm, it was less than 1km away. This felt a bit close for comfort.

Big Bang Flash

Damn, that was CLOSE, first thunder, then lightning. The thunder was so loud, I jumped out of my skin. During this huge fright and dumped the tripod, resulting in some picture blur! (bottom left).

Equipment

Besides have a digital SLR camera, telephone zoom lens and a tripod, the most important accessory was my remote wireless trigger. Having a remote trigger in one hand allows you to scan the clouds in the skies, in anticipation of getting the perfect shot.

Post-Process

I mentioned the return on investment (ROI), earlier in the post and for the bean counters and risk analysers they holding their head in their hands.

For the 47 minutes, standing in the field, I took 325 photographs and once post-processing was completed, the result was;

ONE PHOTOGRAPH

Yes! the one image above is the result and well worth the time, energy and effort, I put into capturing the Photograph.

Lighting Photography is a special category of imaging that only gets results when there is a love & passion for those types of images.