This quick post is in response to a comment on my photobook series image, "My First"...
Central PA Photobook Series: Country Living
"How did you ever happen to capture that?"
I will go back a few years... a buddy and I, both potential photographers without the money and time to deal with the cost of film, used to sit on the balcony at the dormitories on Laughlin Air Force Base near Del Rio Texas... and we'd watch thunderstorms roll in. He'd try to capture lightning shots and may have been occasionally successful. As for me, I quickly learned I could go through a heck of a lot of film and never capture anything but a dark sky.
A couple years ago, when this photo was taken, I had just recently gotten a decent digital camera, an Olympus C765-Ultra Zoom model. It was 4.1MP (good enough in it's day even if it's not the newest and best now). And I was really beginning to get the bug.
Now I live in Central Pennsylvania, and there are things to take photos of in my life every day - all I have to do is learn to open up my eyes. So I had begun to bring the camera along part of the time... and around home I was looking at wildflowers and sunsets and things with a new eye, when one day a thunderstorm rolled up Powell's Valley from the west, straight towards our house.
It was a very slow-moving storm front, and as it got nearer and nearer, the lightning just kept popping, over and over and over again... I got my camera and went out in the back yard (facing the west) and I took shot after shot... almost 60 total - and got nothing but pitch black skies or an occasional "glow" on the horizon. There was lightning all right - I was just getting really good at missing it.
I got discouraged, disgusted, and went inside in a humph... I quit. As I sat in my easy chair, I started looking over the camera. I though - hmmmm... this has a manual setting that has a 15 second exposure... Other than the lightning, it was pitch black outside. Maybe, I should try that.
By this point the storm was passing our house, and rain was beginning to pound down, so I went out front, and stood under the overhand of our porch, pointed the camera into the night-sky, and pressed the shutter button. 15 seconds later, I had myself a black image. I tried again... same results. But the third time, the lightning struck the mountain and the rest is history, as they say.
I have some comments and 'lessons learned' as it were.
1) Knowing what I know now, it's not too smart to be standing out there taking pictures of something this deadly. Look how the tendrils of the lightning came back through the sky right over my head. When we're looking there with the naked eye, we tend to see a really quick light "explosion" and then darkness again - but the camera caught a lot more than that. So if you ever do something like this - don't go stand out in the middle of the field and just do it.
2) I got really lucky. I didn't use a tripod. I might have had the camera braced on the porch post or something but I am not even sure about that. In subsequent attempts, I find myself getting a lot of doubled-lines if I do not use a tripod to steady the camera. Probably the only reason I got what I did in this attempt was because it WAS so pitch black outside that all the camera saw was in that brief second of light.
3) Longer exposures work great - in pitch black darkness. If it's daytime - you just have to get lucky. :)
Hope you found this useful and/or informative. Have a great day!
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