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...
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2 comments:

  1. Rory9:32 PM

    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...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Phil10:21 PM

    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

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G'day there!

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Phil