Thursday, June 11, 2009

Another Serious Storm in Austin

I had planned to spend a night out downtown taking some night time photos (and was already there) but had to seriously leg it home when my wife called to tell me a serious, tornado-producing storm was coming in fast. Just outside my neighborhood, I took a few photos, trying to capture some fork lightning while not getting hit myself!
























And then I tried to capture the neat clouds moving in too...


















As the storm moved away, I ventured outside to take some more snaps. The lightning persisted for quite some time, and I got some neat images. Click on them for full size.




















Tornadoes were reported in the area, but I didn't see any. I am pretty sure I saw a wall cloud though. One day...

2 comments:

Rory said...

Awesome pics, Phil! I especially like the lightning photos!

How did you capture the lightning? I've been playing with a motion sensor script for the Canon Hack Developer's Kit for my PowerShot A590, but have had few opportunities to test it...

Phil said...

Hi Rory,

Thanks for the compliments!

I set my D40 up on a tripod, focused manually to infinity and then set it to Shutter Priority mode. This lets ME set the shutter speed and the CAMERA set the aperture. I set the shutter speed to 30 seconds, and then pointed the camera at the area of the lightning. I took a large range of single 30 second shots until I captured some lightning.

No post-processing except for a little bit of sharpening in GIMP :-)

Cheers,
Phil