I was just about to head to bed for the night around 11PM when I happened to get a peek out the window to see the trees waving a bit more than usual. I stepped out on the porch to a rather dusty night, and after a few moments of enjoying the cool breeze, I noticed a few brief blips of light across the valley to the far North; Looks like I’ll get the chance to shoot my first lightning shots of the year.
I’m not sure if I am to blame it on my own hesitation, laziness, or there just hasn’t been that great of storms this year, but I’ve been pining to get some new shots the mesmerizing streaks across the sky, especially after my last (over-edited) shoot during 2019’s spring season. Tonight’s storm certainly wasn’t the best, and it was quite the trivial pursuit to get the 6 shots that I did - only five of which I’ll be posting below, for the sake of continuity between shots (all but one are landscape 2:3 or 16:9).
Overall I took something to the tune of 800 shots, all of which within a range of 3” to 5” second exposure time and a wildly varying aperture - 3.5 through 11 - mostly due to variations to the telescopic zoom. The shots of the mountain range and small, unlit power poles, stations, and trees along the ridgelines were all around about 100mm zoom, whereas the epic shots of Farnsworth Peak (tall, brightly lit towers) were all the way out at 300mm, which was a real bitch to focus in on without a reliable tripod, a purchase that is sorely needed.
Edit: The following paragraph is wrong, as Squarespace takes the images and resizes them to ~1500x1000.
If you want the full-size images, feel free to pick them up from my Google drive, here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ke6ctHCaJVftBAsnH0iNpgr1iI5KE7N1?usp=sharing
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Normally I’d upload the images at around 1920x~1080 in a jpeg file set to around 80% quality during export to save volumes of SSD space, but the images I’ll be providing today are quite the treat: I want to present you, dear viewer, with the best color gamut and range that a humble little noobie photoblog can provide, which means you’re looking at a width of around 4000px, in lossless PNG-24. I hope they are enjoyable, and feel free to download a few to use as desktop wallpapers if you so desire. Any other posting please just give credit and post the URL, and please forgive the (very possible) long load time.
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To view larger images with a dark background, simply click the photo.