Catching a Storm

Just after sunset last night a lovely big storm rolled along the coast off to the east. I could see flashes of lightning and hear long drawn-out rumbles of thunder. Perhaps it would come close enough for me to try to catch it on camera?

One of my first ever photographs 40 years ago was a very lucky shot of lightning taken by resting the camera on my bedroom window sill and holding the shutter open on "B" setting. Lucky, yes, but you make your own luck. If I hadn't tried I definitely wouldn't have succeeded. So it's a bit strange that I haven't tried shooting lightning since.

Last night, there were a few possible techniques for trying: still images, composite still images, short video clips, or repeating GIF files. Digital has really changed the game. I wasn't sure which would work best but knew that my Gopro 11 Mini camera set on 5k video would give me a good chance of getting something! So I put the camera on a tripod, pointed it in the (hopefully) best direction, pressed record and left it alone.

At that point it looked like the rain would miss us so I didn't set it up under cover. This was a minor mistake. It is waterproof but in the end we did get a smattering of rain and the few drops that landed on the lens are irritating blobs.

Fifteen minutes of 5k video produces an enormous file of over 4GB which my computer struggled with a bit. In the end I settled for a few still frames taken from the video which are more than large enough for blogging at 5312x2988 pixels, plus some action in the form of GIFs. On some of them you can see the blurred dark blobs of raindrops. On the GIF files you can also see an occasional horizontal line between dark and light areas which I think is an effect of the way the shutter works as a cut-off between frames. Another effect of using video to get these images is that some of the lightning trails are incomplete with short gaps. Again I think this is caused by the very short gaps between frames. Taking still images using a longer shutter speed wouldn't have these problems but then I would have been less likely to actually record the lightning at all!

Overall it was a good experiment and I am happy with the results although there is a lot of room for improvement - I hope I don't wait another 40 years to try again!

But on the other hand. I was so focused on the photography that I forgot to actually enjoy the stunning sight of repeated lightning almost over our garden. Shame on me! And damn you photography!