It was a dark and stormy night....

[captpackrat]

I shot about 1000 photos last night.  I'm highly impressed with the battery life of this camera.

Only a dozen or so of the shots came out decently.  I had put the camera into continuous drive mode and just started shooting hundreds of shots at a time, hoping to catch a bolt of lightning.

We got about 2-3/4 inches (7 cm) of rain last night, and the thunder and lightning lasted from before midnight until at least 7 or 8 in the morning.




This picture was taken at about 1 am!


Spooky!

We were under a Tornado Watch earlier today, but it just expired a couple minutes ago without much fanfare.  There are a bunch of Tornado Warnings to the south around the Nebraska/Kansas/Missouri/Iowa borders.

Comments

[rcoony.livejournal.com]

Oooh. Lightning is fun to shoot. I was doing some of that the other night. What I did was I kept the ISO low, and took ten-second or so exposures with the tripod. Close down the aperture a bit too, to prevent overexposure. Since the lightning is only momentary, a few flashes shouldn't overexpose the shot. Mine actually came out pretty decent.

These cameras usually are pretty good for battery life when you are not using the flash at all.

[captpackrat.livejournal.com]

I'll have to try that next time a storm comes through.

Part of the problem was that most of the "lightning" was just flashes of light reflecting off the clouds (sheet lightning), so most of the shots I took were just white flashes. There were very few actual visible bolts.

I discovered the camera was defaulting to ISO-64, so I was mostly getting black. I tried dropping the ISO down to 1600 and I started getting better images, but they were of course quite grainy.

Unfortunately, the maximum exposure on this camera is 4 seconds. It doesn't have a Bulb mode like my film camera.