Lightning

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I currently live in San Tan Valley, Arizona. Lately the weather here has been kind of exciting. Lots of rain, dust storms, and more recently, lightning. I can do without the dust storms, but the lightning is always fun.

18 sec, f13, ISO 400

When I shot these images, I stayed close to my garage and roof of the house. There wasn't much lightning overhead, more so in the distance. However as I continued to shoot photos, the clouds overhead did start to get some streaks of powerful lightning, so I eventually went inside. I'm sure there are better more conductive objects than my metal tripod, but I figured I didn't need to take that chance.

The following image had to be edited more than I like in Photoshop, due to the light streak from a nearby aircraft, which basically made it a straight distracting line in the image. It was more difficult than I imagined, since the spot healing brush did a poor job, and I had to use the clone brush to repair some of the smudges and missing pixels.

17 sec, f13, ISO 400, lots of cleanup in Photoshop.

21 sec, f13, ISO 400

All of these images were shot with my trusty (old) Canon T2i. In all honesty, it doesn't matter what digital camera you have to make these types of night shots. As long as the camera has a bulb setting, is fairly sensitive to low light and deals well with noise, and has a fairly high megapixel count (in case you need to crop). And of course, you will need a remote control and a tripod to insure your images won't blur during the long exposures. The remote control can be found on Ebay for around $10, as for a tripod, I would recommend shopping Goodwill for a cheap second hand, these can be found for approximately $8. Make sure it comes with the mounting base, as they are missing half the time.

Most importantly, make sure you have a decent lens, preferably a wide angle, to capture the wide swaths of sky. And last but not least, a decent photo editing app; I use Photoshop CS5, since I bought it at a discount when I was taking college classes. No need for me to continuously pay subscription fees to Adobe, thank God. If you can't use Photoshop due to the expense, I would recommend PhotoFiltre, as it is free for personal use, and doesn't have a high learning curve. 

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