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Pic of the Week #7

on Jan 09, 2017

The coming storm

Sheldon Hooper Storm 09 12 16 Final

This image was captured out in front of Bush Lodge while my guests and I sat and watched the storm advance on us. It was a powerful event and was the first of the heavy thunderstorms to hit the area for this rainy season. It was as if mother nature had woken up and was now over the two-year long sleep that had left us desperate for water.

Equipment Used

Camera - Canon 7D mkii

Lens and focal length - Tokina 11-20 F2.8

Settings used to capture this image

ISO 400 – Lower ISO as I used quite a slow shutter speed.

Aperture f/(2.8) – Wide as possible to be able to use the lowest ISO possible.

Shutter speed 4 seconds – This was the main component of the settings needed as I set this to a long 4 seconds with the built-in intervalometer set to an interval of 5 seconds so that it had the greatest possible chance of catching the lightning striking and being open long enough to record this without everything whiting out.

Editing used on this image

The process to create this image involved 6 images taken all together using the built-in intervalometer that I blended in Photoshop. I first used Lightroom to remove any overly bright spots, but at the same time raising the brightness of the lightning by utilising the brush tool and decreasing whites and increasing highlights on the 6 images, this will become easier to use later in photoshop. I imported them all into Photoshop and changed the blending settings to Lighten which uses only the lightest parts of the image. I then went back and lightened certain parts of the clouds that I wanted the Lighten blending function to use until I was satisfied.

  • Pic of the week by Sheldon Hooper (Bush Lodge Ranger)
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