{"id":726,"date":"2013-04-13T23:40:42","date_gmt":"2013-04-13T15:40:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ckphoto.net\/blog\/?p=726"},"modified":"2013-04-13T23:43:13","modified_gmt":"2013-04-13T15:43:13","slug":"lightning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ckphoto.net\/blog\/2013\/04\/lightning","title":{"rendered":"Photographing Lightning"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure style=\"width: 640px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/farm9.staticflickr.com\/8388\/8645880402_769b4ffb51_z.jpg\" width=\"640\" height=\"429\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Lightning strikes over Tampines in Singapore.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>It was a dark and stormy night. Frequent bolts of lightning lit up the night sky followed by the rumble of thunder. I never really captured lightning with my camera so I decided to give it a try and quickly set up my camera on the tripod and pointed it out of the window.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The trick about shooting lightning is not to wait for a bolt and then release the shutter. That would be a guaranteed miss unless you have superhero-type reflexes. Of course, there are commercially-available <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lightningtrigger.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">lightning triggers<\/a> available which triggers your camera shutter on a flash of lightning but at &gt; US$300, they are quite expensive.<\/p>\n<p>It is kind of hard to predict when the lightning will strike, so the best way is to take lots of shots. Since it&#8217;s at night, it&#8217;ll require a longish exposure which should increase the chance of capturing it. But I didn&#8217;t really want to stand by the camera and take many shots, so following\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/petapixel.com\/2013\/04\/10\/how-to-photograph-lightning-from-start-to-finish\/\" target=\"_blank\">this article on Petapixel<\/a>, I used the camera&#8217;s intervalometer to do the job for me.<\/p>\n<p>Instead of the 20-30s which the author recommended as a starting point, I decided to go with 10s @ f\/11, ISO 100 as I didn&#8217;t want the foreground to be overexposed. I then set the camera to take a shot every 10s and left it to do its thing.<\/p>\n<p>About 1 hour, 15 minutes later, I ended up with 226 shots. Reverse-scrolling through the shots initially made me disappointed as all I had was a black skies. Eventually I saw the lightning strikes captured in the images and grinned with joy. However, out of 226 shots, only about 6 had the lightning strike, and only 3 captured it nicely. The following and the opening photo are the successful ones.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 640px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/farm9.staticflickr.com\/8406\/8645880048_7f62372f15_z.jpg\" width=\"640\" height=\"429\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Lightning strike at Tampines<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<figure style=\"width: 640px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/farm9.staticflickr.com\/8528\/8644780051_995bfb2429_z.jpg\" width=\"640\" height=\"429\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Lightning strike over Tampines<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Just for fun, I also tried compositing the three images into one. Pity the bolts of lightning are more or less at the same location. It&#8217;d have been much nicer if they are more spread out.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 640px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/farm9.staticflickr.com\/8381\/8645880938_037be52ff3_z.jpg\" width=\"640\" height=\"429\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">3-shot composite of the lightning strikes over at Tampines.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It was a dark and stormy night. Frequent bolts of lightning lit up the night sky followed by the rumble of thunder. I never really captured lightning with my camera so I decided to give it a try and quickly set up my camera on the tripod and pointed it out of the window.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[320,322,21,323,321],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ckphoto.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ckphoto.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ckphoto.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ckphoto.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ckphoto.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=726"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.ckphoto.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":730,"href":"http:\/\/www.ckphoto.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726\/revisions\/730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ckphoto.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ckphoto.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ckphoto.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}