Saturday's Lightning Storm

Saturday, after I arrived home from the White Shark and Whales Trip, I sat down to supper that my grandson and great-granddaughter prepared for me.  After which I had a delicious carrot cake birthday cake.

I went outside to get something that I had left in the car and to my North were clouds with intermittent glow from lightning and some lightning flashes.  I set up my tripod, camera and lens, and since it was dark out, I experimented with various settings and ended up, utilizing an ISO of 400, f-stop of F/5.6 and 10 seconds, which gave me the picture I wanted.  I set my interval timer in the camera for one picture every 11 seconds to make sure that the previous picture would be written to the card.  I started the timer and as the clouds started moving more toward the north east.  I did change the location of the tripod and camera.  I ended up finally move in the camera from the parking lot to my back porch hopefully to catch some more lightning bolts as the storm was moving away.  During this whole time we did not have any rain until the storm moved completely away, then the rains came.

After importing the pictures into Lightroom, I adjusted the color balance then selected a baseline photo and then a number of photos which had lightning bolts in it.  Utilizing the same technique as I did, making firefly composite pictures, I exported the pictures as layers into Photoshop.  Then I auto-aligned the images, made sure the base image was on the bottom, took the rest of the images and change the mode from normal to lighten and created a composite of lightning bolts over my condo complex.

I then took the complete initial set of pictures and made a short video.  I also took all pictures to make a video showing the passage of the storm.