Lightning

Copyright it!
 
Got a ton of lightning shots, pulled from video, over the weekend. This is one of my favs. Have a cooler shot of it shooting under the drone but pulling from video, the rolling shutter got me with the upper and lower halves of different exposures.
View attachment 103172

Nice! Easily the best lightning shot from a drone ever taken!
 
I recall standing about 40 feet away from one lonely tree in the center of a block of land in a tiny town on the Queensland border in Australia. I was doing a TV News interview at the time and holding a Metal microphone attached to a large tripod and camera. I'm positive I felt it coming, I noticed the hairs on the back of my neck standing up seconds before it hit. That poor tree caught a direct hit and exploded as if a bomb had been planted inside it. Massive branches were thrown not far from where we were standing. I remember feeling as if something had given me a powerful punch to my body and every hair on my body tingled. It's hard to explain but obviously the explosion was the sap inside the tree suddenly expanding and blowing the tree apart. The person I was interviewing had his back to the tree, but unfortunately the camera had it out of shot because I wanted grain silos in the background. Normally I would have been closer to the tree to have it in shot to break up the background.

Lucky we weren't closer, but I do wish I'd had the tree in shot. On reviewing the tape we could see the bright flash, the AGC didn't have time to close down, but I got shots of the tree in pieces and smoke pouring out of it. That night it led the news and the real story was shown the following day. By the way, there was no rain before or after, and just as well, if the ground had been wet, I think we would have felt it a little too much.
Last time I had that feeling I yelled out "RUN!", I ran like hell and the tree just a few yards from where we were standing got split in half just a few seconds later. Too close for comfort!

Slow-mo lightning pics are interesting. You can see how the ground currents can work.

AGC? All our remote crews are told to stick to manual iris...
 
The reason I was using auto was simply because I was one up for the day. My gopher was off for the day. So it was nail the talent's feet to the ground, set to auto and hope for the best. Nothing worse than having the Sun go behind a cloud and have everything go dark.:)
 
I was flying my Phantom 3S about a year ago and a lightning strike was much farther away than the one in your pic. I lost signal and the drone came home, but was unstable. I had to send it in to be repaired because the wifi board was damaged.
 
Any chance of exposure info? FPS? Been wanting to try this, but so far too chicken...
Auto exposure at 60 FPS. Won't do auto exposure again as it changed mid frame killing some of the shots. 60 FPS (or 120 even better) I think is the most important. Even at 60FPS, this shot was only in one frame.
Nice image.

As for the rolling shutter comment, were you using auto exposure?
Yeah and I realize that was a mistake now. Some of the shots turned out like this one. This would have been the second best shot except for the exposure change mid frame.
SnapShot(3).jpg
 
Auto exposure at 60 FPS. Won't do auto exposure again as it changed mid frame killing some of the shots. 60 FPS (or 120 even better) I think is the most important. Even at 60FPS, this shot was only in one frame.

Yeah and I realize that was a mistake now. Some of the shots turned out like this one. This would have been the second best shot except for the exposure change mid frame.
View attachment 103501
WOW. That's all I can say is WOW.
 
Got a ton of lightning shots, pulled from video, over the weekend. This is one of my favs. Have a cooler shot of it shooting under the drone but pulling from video, the rolling shutter got me with the upper and lower halves of different exposures.
View attachment 103172
Love it. Thanks for sharing. At the risk of sounding too serious, a picture like that is a good reminder of how insignificant we are in the universe.
 

Recent Posts

Members online

No members online now.

Forum statistics

Threads
143,105
Messages
1,467,679
Members
104,992
Latest member
Johnboy94