The Storms

And so after a crazy Wednesday evening of thunder & lightning storms in this area,
newsflashes of Tornado warnings where my
parents are now staying in Haliburton area of Ontario, and of not being able to get through
due to power outages in that area..
I woke up this morning with a terrible stomach ache and a massive headache.
Low density perhaps?

And so after a good day's sleep into the afternoon, and a relaxing medicated bath,

I decided to go through some of my pictures from
last night's thunderstorm. Out of the 100 photos that I took, from a propped up camera in my livingroom window, I managed to grab 10 really great shots of the lightning storm.
I have added a three samples for your enjoyment. The series will be posted in a special gallery to be named later on this site.
The lightning bolts last night showed well in the photos, with bright white and blue streaks across the skies, branching out of the main bolt like roots from a tree in the ground. An amazing show of light dancing in the sky, and apparently onto the ground as well. Firetrucks were on the way down Oakdale Avenue, commanding the wind and rain swept streets for their storm-struck destinaton. It is possible that they were on a different mission, however with the amount of lightning there was last evening, the likelihood of lightning demise was more likely.
I can definitely say that capturing lightning is by chance and luck, however, there is a certain timing and skill involved as well. I was using 100 ASA for starters, which is a slower film processing speed, which would allow for the capture of light moving across the skies. And then I played...
I started off with f5.6 at 25 seconds, which brought out alot of the orange-hue evening skies..that gave a neat effect with the lightning and the skies giving off that "firey-destruction-like" feel to the photos. I then bracketed up to f9 at 15 seconds. This brought out a lot of the darkness in the forground, and helped to silhouette the background, buildings, and trees against hazy-white clouds reflecting the very bright and blue-streaked lightning bolts.

A truly exciting experience this was to capture the lightning in such a brilliant display
..and now to share with all of you!

If any readers of this post out there would like to share in this blog entry your own experiences with capturing lightning, or even any cool storm experiences you have had, please feel free to do as such. Storms are fascinating, exciting, and thrill seeking to others, even to some..scary and traumatic....how do you like storms?

~Tom