Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Thought Behind the Shot-2

Gods creativity-lightning from a moving car

We were driving towards Denver and in the horizon we could see a thunderstorm and in 20-30 minutes we were in the middle of it. I quickly got on to the back seat and tried a few shots of the lightning. Here are the problems:

  • How do you predict the time lightning will strike to click the shutter at the same time?
  • How do you select the exposure as everything is dark till lightning strikes?
Here is what I did:
  • Pointed the camera at approximately the direction in which maximum lightning was occurring
  • Selected Manual Exposure and chose a long exposure of about 20 seconds and f4 (I could have chosen slightly higher aperture at say f5.6)
  • Selected Manual Focus and set it to infinity
  • Clicked and prayed there would be a lightning strike in those 20 seconds
The horizontal streaks are headlights of other vehicles passing by during the 20 sec exposure

2 comments:

  1. Why do I feel... I have read all this before??

    De'ja vu!! :D

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dear Mr PV,
    There indeed is a lot to learn.
    Thanks

    ReplyDelete