Electric Tower

Toronto, ON, Canada. August 24th 2011.

Huge thunderstorm during the night.

Raiden visits Toronto ...

---------------------------

Due to popular demand, a more detailed description of the shoot:

August 24th, 2011. Weather network says the mother of all thunderstorms is coming to Toronto, with a chance of Tornado. Awesome. I cleaned my lenses, format memory card, checked batteries, and waited.

Lightning photography 101: Treat lightning as flash. Adjusting shutter speed will have little impact. The lightning will just dump a load of light onto the sensor no matter how fast you have it. The key here is to lengthen the shutter speed to 30+ seconds or bulb, adjust the ISO and aperture to make a proper exposure for ambient light (decrease ISO and boost f number). Any lightning that hits during the long exposure will be captured.

I live near the top of a 40+ level condo, which meant I had a great view of the tower, as well as the Yorkville area to the north. When the storm hit, I setup my D90 on my patio on a good CF tripod, with a 18-105 VR zoom lens (basic kit lens) at 18 mm, f22, ISO 100, 30 second exposures. I connected a remote shutter cord, and held the button down. This basically lets the camera shoot 30 second exposures automatically, eventually I had this shot.

[link]

However, there was a problem. It takes another 30 seconds of processing to generate the RAW file in camera, which meant that I had 30 seconds of exposure, followed by 30 seconds of non-exposure processing time. I was losing 50% of all the shots! So then I grabbed my handy LX5, manual mode, ISO 80, shutter = 30 seconds, f 8.0, zoomed all the way out, manual focus to infinity. I put that on a gorilla pod, which was then wrapped to another tripod (I needed the extra height to get over the patio railings). I staggered the shots so that when the D90 was processing, the LX5 was shooting. Unfortunately, the LX5 didn't have an auto-shoot mode, so I had to click the shutter every 60 seconds (30 exposure + 30 sec processing).

[Footnote] I realized the 30 second processing time in my DSLR was because I turned in-camera long-exp noise reduction feature on. So for future shots, please turn in-camera NR off.

Now I had another problem, my two cameras were facing north, towards Yorkville area, but to the south was the CN tower which I wanted to shoot. So I decided to split my camera setup, LX5 towards the CN tower, D90 towards Yorkville. This meant I was losing 50% of the shots, which meant risking not getting any pictures. However, I gained two angles, which means I have a chance to get two lightning pictures in different scenes.

My CN tower view was out of my bedroom window, which was covered by rain drops. I originally thought about moving to one of my neighbor's patios, which had an unobstructed view (no glass) of the CN tower. However, I realized the rain drops added to the atmosphere of the shot. It was risky as I wasn't sure how the lightning light would interact with the rain drops. Decided to stick with it, loaded the LX5 onto a gorilla pod and taped it to my window. Recall LX5 has no autoshoot, so I clicked the shutter every 60 seconds ... for about 3 hours. I got this shot about halfway through. I missed some hits, but this was by far the most epic, which I caught (50% chance). I wish I had 3 more DSLRs with me, so I can stagger shoot both views.

Lesson learned. Be prepared, and you'll be rewarded.

--------------------

WOOT! MY FIRST DD! Thank you all!

I've been trying to get a shot like this for ages. I love the Toronto skyline, but it's been shot to oblivion. There are countless variations already, each almost done to perfection. The next challenge for me was to capture the skyline in cool weather conditions. I imagined it to be pre- or post- thunderstorm, with the rolling clouds moving in/out during sunrise/sunset (nice golden sidelight). Never knew I'd take the first shot *during* a storm.

I still think the rolling clouds concept is still worthwhile to pursue, but the timing has to be perfect. The storm has to come in right during sunset or sunrise. And you'll probably get drenched during the shoot ...

[Foodnote:] Interesting thing I noticed ... if you look closely at the major branches, you can see smaller, less visible branches close by but almost identical in shape. I realized this was an effect of my window, which has two layers of glass. The smaller branches were reflections of the light coming in, then bouncing on the inner glass, then on the outer glass, then to the camera. This explains the identical shape, and why it's off position from the major branches. It'd be cool to utilize this effect in future shoots.