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We had some good storms this past week with better-than-normal optical viewing conditions. The first three are from 5/15. The first two are of a triggered lightning attempt that morphed into a 5-stroke natural lightning (only second documented case of this on record) and struck a telephone pole. The third is a typical triggered lightning discharge.







The last set is from 5/17. These were shot from about 8pm-9pm. Most of the discharges are 3-10 km from the cameras. The first image is particularly interesting. There were four separate cloud-to-ground channels in very close spatial proximity within a 1.8 s exposure (very unusual).

Very nice Dustin.

Great captures!

Are you getting these with a quick trigger finger or is there some special method?

Cool. Thanks for sharing.

Hey Dustin,

How do you set the focus? I can see in the fading light where you would have enough to see what to focus on, but at night you cant. I took some last night, but had trouble getting them in focus. I ended up shooting in Manual, but still with no light available, its hard to get the camera in focus.

Rik,
I have a network of eight Nikon D5000's and D5100's in different locations. Each camera has a custom micro-controller board that communicates over a fiber-optic link to a control PC. The micro-controller is interfaced with the remote shutter release port of the camera. The cameras all operate in bulb mode so that the micro-controller can dictate the exposure time. The exposure time is set by commands from the control computer (which runs a Labview virtual instrument). The exposure can be set by estimating the ambient light conditions by eye or by reading the output of a photodiode. When I send the command to start recording, the cameras shoot continuous exposures at the commanded exposure time with about 20 ms between frames. I have cameras with 6-stop ND filters and circular polarizing filters for shooting long exposures during the day and cameras without filters for night-time work. The groups are controlled independently. Kind of an elaborate setup, but video images absolutely cannot reproduce the detail you get from stills.

Bill,
I run all the cameras in full manual mode (exposure and focus). I run Sigma 10-20 mm lenses on most of the cameras with the focus pegged at infinity. For most lightning shots with wide-angle lenses, focusing at infinity is the best option. The depth of field is so large (I shoot an aperture of f/18 on daytime shots and f/11 on night shots) that everything in front of the camera is in focus.

[quote="Dustin"]Rik,
I have a network of eight Nikon D5000's and D5100's in different locations. Each camera has a custom micro-controller board that communicates over a fiber-optic link to a control PC. The micro-controller is interfaced with the remote shutter release port of the camera. The cameras all operate in bulb mode so that the micro-controller can dictate the exposure time. The exposure time is set by commands from the control computer (which runs a Labview virtual instrument). The exposure can be set by estimating the ambient light conditions by eye or by reading the output of a photodiode. When I send the command to start recording, the cameras shoot continuous exposures at the commanded exposure time with about 20 ms between frames. I have cameras with 6-stop ND filters and circular polarizing filters for shooting long exposures during the day and cameras without filters for night-time work. The groups are controlled independently. Kind of an elaborate setup, but video images absolutely cannot reproduce the detail you get from stills.

quote]

So Dustin,

Where can I get one of these?