Day 102

102/365, originally uploaded by Aaron LaRue.

Cue lightning!

I had a super busy day and could not, for the life of me, come up with a good picture. I finished TA-ing (there has to be a better way to put that…) around 7 and it was already dark (which makes me really worried about this project come winter time). There was a really sick thunder cloud going off in the distance so I went home, grabbed my camera, and put one of my theories to the test.

I have been trying to figure out how to capture lightning for a long time, and I learned the proper way to do it is to get something like a lightning trigger, which is an optical sensor that picks up the flash of the lightning and trips the shutter. I am poor, and there was no way I was going to invest in something like that (especially since I would be able to use it once a year in SoCal), so I tried to figure out how to shoot lightning without one.

My idea: shoot with a low aperture (so that you can collect the light from the strike), a low ISO (so you don't get grain) and a really long shutter speed, then pray that it strikes while the shutter is open. It's super unreliable, you kind of just have to take pictures successively, but it would work great in a storm where lightning was consistent and quick in succession. So that's what I did here, I popped my camera on a nearby post and waited. Unfortunately, by the time I was ready, the lightning was kind of pathetic, not to mention sparse. I think i took close to 60 frames, 2 of which had lightning in them, but hey, it worked and I got what I wanted.