Just one more... come on... just one more

August 27, 2006

I was going to write about our trip back across america - we did, on day two take a lot of pics, but then the sun came out in New Mexico and I thought I'd share a couple of images from my evening yesterday.

I thought about calling this entry a day in the life of my camera, but I didn't even start taking pictures till about 7 pm.

Then I thought about calling it upstairs / downstairs because thats what I have to do, start working downstairs, then grab the images through the wireless network and see what they really look like.

My downstairs computer it great for photo work and it just had a "hot rod" addition to speed up the photo processing, but the monitor, while perfect for typing school papers and the such, is just too bright for what you see on the web.

So anyhow, the late sun was hitting the sunflowers just over the wall on the east side of the house so I went back to take a shot or two.

While there my neighbor and I got to talking and he bent over in his garden and picked up this guy and put him on the wall.

I took him in hand and tried to move him into more light but the sun was just going behind a cloud. It could be sharper, but that's what you get when you shoot with a big camera one handed.

I then went to the south side of the house and liked the way the sun was hitting the corn so I took a series of shots there.

Then I went upstairs to the front balcony to watch the sunset, and while nice, it's nothing like the images I got from a couple of days ago that I will post later.

Just before going downstairs to eidt all of the images, I walked over to the north side balcony and fired off a couple of shots of a thunderstorm that was approaching the mountain.

I wanted to try and get the sun on the top of the storm and the lightning below, and as you can see, chance favored the perpared, once again.

Because I did end up making some money this summer, and because I thought I would need some software for a presentation I am working on for a professor, I decided to splurge (with my academic discount) and buy a set of the Adobe Studio 8 software, with all the latest adobe products, including dreamweaver and flash. Flash is going to get my attention this semester, but meanwhile, I've also got plenty of books on how to work with the new CS2 photoshop. Hopefully I can figure out how to edit the storm pics better.

So anyhow I went downstairs, started processing the images and heard some thunder in the distance. The storm above had started to move behind the mountain and I wondered why I was hearing thunder.

Turns out that another "small" storm was marching east, and although I had dismissed it as being not worthy of attention, took a peek out of the front blinds and saw a flash of light.

Back to the north balcony I went, grabbing a new card for the camera since all my images from earlier in the day were still downloading to the computer.

I was not disappointed.

I shot a series of images and kept increasing the length of time for the exposure and decreasing the amount of light entering the camera so that I could leave the shutter open for several seconds. That way I figured I would "catch" more lightning.

And it worked.

Granted, this image is a bit "blown out" from the bright light, but what I really liked here is the lighting of the entire storm from one strike.

As the storm moved closer to the mountain there were two storms to shoot with the one behind the mountain providing backlighting and occasionally and occasionally lighting up the top of the thunderstorm.

I kept shooting, exposure after exposure, each either 8 or 10 seconds in length.

Finally after a series of great strikes (which I'll save for a lightning page) I stood on the balcony for a long time with no significant lightning.

I clicked the shutter and said out loud, just one more time, just one more time.

Boom

"Oh Yes"

After the strike, I put my hand in front of the lens to block any more light from entering.

Chance and patience, and the new Photoshop CS2 which repaired this image from the "artifacts" that appear on a digital image when you leave it open for long periods of time.