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Night exposures |
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Shot on a commercial assignment for an electrical equipment company. St. Louis, Missouri ©1980 Joseph Matthews
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This
is the time honored and easiest way to capture great lightning shots.
To make them great you have to have a good composition and exposure.
Luck doesn't hurt, either.
Work out a time exposure that gives you 8 with ISO100 slide film. What kind of reciprocity failure or color shift do you get? Can you filter for it or is it acceptable. F8 probably gives you your lenses best resolution and enough depth of field for this kind of work. Any smaller of an -stop and the exposures can get too long. Any wider open and you'll probably start to burn out detail in your bolt. The exposure problem is this: you have darkness so you need to add exposure time or open the lens; but you have an intensely bright light source that appears for a quarter of a second or so. Zap, instant overexposure in the same frame. The trick is to find the middle ground. Try 8 or 11 to keep detail in the lightning stroke (ISO 100 slide film). Then you need to calculate how long an exposure you need to have detail in the dark without losing the "night" of the shot. Too small an f-stop will make the lightning strokes look weak. Go back and look at your scouted locations at night. Take some test shots with the same film and equipment you will normally use for chasing storms. Is the detail there? Are there overexposed or "blown out" areas? Street and building lights are the worst offenders on this type of overexposure. Take notes, you wont remember next year when the storm finally comes through. Test the film in easy to replicate time increments. For that 11 aperture, try 15 seconds, then 30, then 45, then 60. Test 8, too. Time to shoot. Drive carefully, but get out in front of that cell. Set up the tripod and mount the camera. Put on the cable release if you have one. Compose your shot. If the lightning is already happening, open the camera and start your first exposure. Don't try to shot as it happens. You will miss more than you get. Watch your time, when the scene is properly exposed, lightning or no, close the shutter, wind and open it again. If you are tempted to leave it open longer thinking you might still capture a bolt--well, you might. But it will be on an overexposed frame. It not worth it.
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