Room with a view – The Lightning Round

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Capturing lightning with your camera is just as hard as capturing it in the proverbial bottle. I’ve been frustrated numerous times in the past with my attempts to capture this elusive phenomenon. New York City is susceptible to violent lightning storms in the summers and I’ve had a few chances to get a shot. But short of an attempt back in 2009, which can be seen here, I never managed to get a shot that was to my liking….till now.

Following three consecutive days of the mercury nudging 100F this storm was imminent and badly needed to take the edge of the sweltering heat. It started brewing close to 6pm on June 9th 2011; I could see the ominous cloud cover rolling in from a distance. At that point there was still too much ambient light for me to set the long exposure needed to capture lightning, without overexposing the picture. Also with the rain coming down, minutes after the lightning started, it was a constant challenge keeping the lens dry, even though I was shooting from the relative comfort of my apartment. And the clouds covered the NYC skyline in a matter of minutes, reducing the lightning from sky-splitting streaks to mere strobes. So I chalked up yet another failed attempt and settled down to continue working on one of my other blog posts.

After a little over two hours the skies cleared up again and the rain was more of a fine mist, which is traditionally how NYC rain tends to be. On stepping out of the apartment for a few minutes to run some errands , I realized that the sky was still charged and the lightning had resumed with all its former intensity.

On returning home I mounted the camera on the tripod and took my time adjusting the exposure and framing the shot; a different tactic than my previous frantic attempts. I guess I had resigned myself to the notion that if I was meant to get a shot… I would, so I decided to take my time and enjoy what I was witnessing rather than stress about getting the shot. With my camera’s aperture set to F16, ISO of 200 and shutter speed of 8″ I waited, remote release in hand to trigger the shutter at the first sign of lightning activity. (NOTE: I could’ve used the BULB mode to manually trigger the shutter but I used a gut setting of 8″. Either way I think I would ended up with close to the same exposure).

At roughly 8:50pm that evening lightning split the sky, starting on the right and rapidly progressing to the left half of the frame, spanning the length of the skyline as it ripped across the pregnant sky. I triggered the shutter as soon as I detected it and let the camera do the rest. I smiled while the camera did it’s thing for 8 seconds, knowing that I had captured what had eluded me all this while. And not a minute sooner because the clouds rolled in and the rain started coming down minutes after I got this picture, shrouding the skyline once again for pretty much 2 whole days after that.

Lightning strike over NYC

Hope you enjoyed this post and happy shooting everyone

-S

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