I'm Baaaaack!

Another 3 week absence. My email is clogged with "where are you?" and "why haven't you written anything?" and "Are you OK? Did you fall off the Earth?" type messages. I guess I needed some down time to reflect on where I am and where I'm going.

I actually spent some time with real human beings. Not cybernerds, not pixelheads. Well sort of — in between 3 motorcycle courses, swimming and biking and other stuff, I sat on a dock, watched the sunset and talked about non-photographic stuff. I enjoyed a whole new level of interaction that didn't involve a camera and with minimal computer time. I also met a new person who is influencing my life to a degree. Some stuff I won't share on a blog, but there is an interesting dimension. She's an artist. I'm about that far from picking up a paintbrush. Yes, a real one, not wired through my Wacom tablet.

For the past two weeks, I didn't pick up a single photo book or magazine (well that all stopped last weekend, but...). Instead, I looked through a thick tome of Group of Seven paintings, a book of Picasso's work... and just viewed the world differently. My perspective is changing. I don't know if I'm ready to put it into effect, but I'm slowly trying.

My artist friend told me, "stop thinking about composition. About f/stops and shutter speeds. In fact, stop thinking. Just do what comes naturally". In my defense, that's what I've been trying to do! Her point is, "stop trying, do it!" It's hard to put in words what she's taught me. Once, we pulled over to the side of the road for a long discussion about colour blends and complements, and she showed me a patch of sand and some grass and how the light blended them... hope I can get it.

You tell me whether you see a change in my work. Not today or tomorrow, over time. I'm heading in a new direction.

Back to reality. We visited the Minden Cultural Centre one afternoon. There's an art gallery (yeah, well — a daily drawing of a teapot doesn't turn me on), and some 19th century buildings. HDR material: here are a couple of shots.

The focal point is the bright orange cupola on the schoolhouse. I tried to lead your eye there with the sidewalk. Great dramatic sky
don't you think?

Inside the schoolhouse. I think the desks are on skids so the curator can move them around more easily. There was a similar picture chosen as "Editor's Choice" on the NAPP portfolio site this week
I like mine better!

Last weekend, I spent a few days with some really good photographers and friends. Whenever I do that, I somehow end up with some interesting images. Here are a few of them, starting with the mundane and progressing to the 'cool' side.

We spent several hours photographing the "Thunder on the Grand" boat races in Dunnville. Here are two of my favourites:

I shot almost everything at a slow shutter speed. This one was extreme: 1/15 second. I wanted to achieve an abstract motion blur.

This was also at a slow shutter speed – 1/125 second. My friends were shooting at 1/1000 second to freeze the action. By panning, I captured a sharp image of the boat and the motion blur of the background. He was travelling at almost 100 mph.

Kids in a Candy Store. I couldn't resist. Imagine their expressions, and what was going through their minds.

Lake Erie on a moody day. Although Photomatix HDR and Topaz Adjust toning added texture and sharpness (well softness in the sky), this is much more effective in black-and-white than in colour.

The final image for today is another HDR, but the lightning has been artificially added. I read a tutorial on how to create it on the NAPP site and this is my first attempt. I'll write it up on my technical blog in a bit, but if you're a NAPP member, you can watch Corey's video yourself.

These last two images are works in progress. The lightning shot especially: it doesn't look real yet. The concept is there, but execution is not. Still, it's interesting and a way to spice up a sky. I plan to do some more work on them so stay tuned!

— 30 —

I Love Thunderstorms!

I said that before. About a month ago. At the time I said I remembered having a multiple-lightning-hit phot from years ago and that I'd post it here when I find it. I will: I just haven't found it yet.

But last night, there was a thunderstorm. There was a lot of lightning going on, but not right overhead. It was a really active storm, but the lightning was cloud-to-cloud, not cloud-to-ground. The storm centre had passed and it wasn't raining that hard. OK, I grabbed the camera, the tripod, an umbrella and headed out into the back yard.

Without further ado, here's what I got:

This is a 5-shot multiple exposure taken over the course of about 5 minutes. Any time the shutter was open for more than 15 seconds, I had to wait the same length of time for the noise-reduction process to complete. Frustrating, because I wanted to press the button again!

If you want to try this at home, here's what to do. This is for a nighttime shoot: all the numbers go out the window if you're shooting during the day. I think it's do-able, but you'll have to experiment to avoid light polluting your images.

The setup

• You need a tripod. Ideally you should also have a shutter release cable (mine was in the house, but I wasn't going to leave the camera out in the rain without an umbrella to go get it!).
• Find a spot where your camera isn't going to get rained on or take a chance and use an umbrella.
• Use a relatively wide angle lens. You don't know where the lightning is going to be and it's good to include something other than sky in the shot. Find a way to focus on infinity then switch to manual focus. Don't forget to turn off the VR if you have it, when you're on a tripod. I forgot.
• Set the ISO relatively low. I happened to use the minimum (ISO = 100) but that's not necessary. I also opened the lens all the way (f/3.5 in this case) but if I were doing it again, I'd use f/8 and an ISO around 250.
• Set the shutter to "M" and use the 'bulb' setting so it stays open as long as you hold down the shutter.

Shooting the pictures

OK. What we're shooting for (pardon the pun) is a single frame with a bunch of lightning bolts in it, or at least one spectacular one. Since my session was a passing storm and there were no really good cloud-to-ground bursts, what I was planning to do was to shoot several frames and then sandwich them together. That only works if you take care not to move the camera between shots.

My typical exposure time was in the 15-30 second range. I was trying to stay under 15 seconds as I mentioned above, but generally that didn't work. Since there was about 5 seconds between lightning events, I waited for one, then pressed the shutter release a few seconds later and held it down until there was some activity. Not just one hit, several, if I could get them. I seldom actually saw the lightning bolt itself, just the flash in the sky, but the sensor picked it up!

Shoot, hold for some events, release, wait for the NR process (this may be a Nikon thing. I don't know about other brands). If I didn't think there was anything going on, i tried to beat the 15 seconds or I switched the camera off and back on again to defeat the NR delay and take another shot.

I was out for about 15 or 20 minutes, until the storm had moved off to the east, out of sight. Inside, upload the images to the computer, check them out and select good frames in Lightroom.

Sidebar: since there's a thunderstorm going on, you did shut down your computers, didn't you? I actually didn't, but mine are plugged into a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) with superb surge protection. Won't help if you get a direct lightning hit, but it's pretty good otherwise. Get one. They're inexpensive. They're heavy, though — all battery — so get one at the local computer store instead of trying to ship it from somewhere else.

Post Processing

If you're using Lightroom, you can select the images of interest, right-click, choose "Edit in Photoshop" and select "open as layers". Or you can do it manually, your choice. Now unless you do something, the only layer that will be visible will be the top one, but it's a simple task to select a blending mode that works. For me, that was "Lighten". I went through all the layers and set them to this mode which made all the lightning bolts visible!

Occasionally that didn't work, so I turned off a couple of layers, or played with them by adding a layer mask and painting on it. My main concern was that the clouds had moved between shots and I wanted to see the better formations. This took a bunch of fiddling. I discovered that using a soft brush with low opacity made things blend better.

Night shots are blue. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I didn't think it conveyed the "heat" of a thunderstorm. After saving the image as a multi-layer .psd file, I flattened it, then converted it to greyscale (black and white). Just for fun, I ticked off the "tint" box and lo and behold, up came this rich golden orange colour. Save it, back to Lightroom to crop and tweak some exposure values, and we're done.

If most of what I just wrote is Greek to you, then you should join NAPP and learn a bit of Photoshop. Most of what I did would be considered "basic". If you have a good lightning bolt shot in your own portfolio, I'd love to see it, because
I Love Thunderstorms!