Longexposure Photography - Summer Storm
This is one of my first attempts at long exposure photography.
We get amazing storms though Brisbane, Australia at this time of year. I have a great view of the city from my apartment building, so I have been playing around with taking some photos during the storm. Balancing the brightness of the city lights with the length of exposure required to capture the lightning strike has proven really challenging. I'd really like to do more of this type of photography, so any tips on how to improve this style of photography is greatly appreciated.
Canon 500D with Canon EFS 18 mm - 200 mm Lens. f4.0, Shutter 10 sec, ISO 100.
Nice catch, did you take photos at intervals to try to capture lightning strikes?
I pretty much shot continuously for about 15 minutes. It would take the camera about 10 seconds to reset between each shot and they kept striking at the wrong time :) I got about three shots where I actually captured the lightning itself.
Ahhh interesting, very cool stuff! Capturing lightning is definitely not easy, I'm a complete nooby photographer haha
Not bad for 10 seconds! You were lucky to get that shot :)
Any tips, not really. This is my own personal preference, I'd probably darken it a little and maybe balance the image a bit towards the blue like this (I used the side of a concrete building to get my white balance). What do you think, too blue ?
A touch too blue, but much better than the original. What did you edit it with?
I also took about a hundred 10s images to get that one shot :)
Gimp 2.8. I just dropped the brightness a little and set white against the side of the building (which is problably why it is a bit blue). Some people have been doing competitions where you post an image and ask people to process it, and the best result gets 1 SBD. They often get 10x that in votes so it's a pretty good model :)
How about this?
What do you think of this? This was set the whitebalance on the cloud, desaturated the image about 30%, darkened it and played a little with the individual green and blue levels.
That's awesome!
I only used Gimp for the first time yesterday and I wasn't confident to play around with the colour balance to much.
Thanks @aghunter! I find colour balance a bit of challenge too, as even just setting a whitepoint on an image may not be good enough and you still end up with a cast. In that image I got a bit lazy and looked at couple of images of lightening on the web I liked and d tried to match the colour balance with the colour sliders. I think the clouds having a dark grey-blue to grey-purple seems to have the most effect. Also having the clouds a bit darker brings out the lightening a bit more.
This is a very challenged area in photography. If city lights are so much, you can use ND filters. It helps you to reduce the highlights and you will not reduce exposing time ;)
Awesome. Thanks for the suggestion. I haven't used ND filters before. Something else for me to play around with :)
Not a bad suggestion. He can also drop the f ratio to around f11, as I think he must of had the lens wide open at f4. Diffraction shouldn't be too much of a problem at f11.
I think the shot is pretty awesome, love how clear that lightning fork is darting from the cloud to the buildings!
Now on the one hand I think you could colour shift it slightly so that the sky is darker and more ominous and the buildings aren't so washed out and bright (maybe do something similar to the blue one, make it slightly darker and then up the contrast) to make it more "epic" looking.
On the other hand I think you've done a brilliant job capturing that very brief bright like a nuclear holocaust retina burning moment that happens when the lightning actually strikes before the world is plunged back to normal lighting, and that it's fine as it is :)
Thanks Ryi!!!
I played about with it a bit in gimp. You can see the outcome in my convo with Terry!
A beautiful picture taken at the perfect moment!!
This photo looks really cool. I like the colors in it as well. Crazy lightning! I love lightning storms. <3
Congratulations @aghunter!
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Awesome photography,r
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