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Those lightning shots and the low angle set up at Lake Tahoe are great images! Here is one I clicked off last Friday along the central coast of California. McWay Falls drops 80 ft to the sea below, but it is just a minor element in this large scene.
[img]/http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8343/8...595476b5_b.jpgTidefalls - - - Big Sur, California by ernogy, on Flickr[/img]
Clicked off....LOL. I bet there are a lot of us who wish we could click ones off like this.
Great shot mate.
Ben, fabulous lightning shots... especially #2.
Erno, great work on that scene. I was there in March and wasn't able to come anywhere close to this kind of result. I'm a bit torn whether the tree silhouette against the sky adds to the image or not. I'm thinking it would also be a great picture without the tree in it. Mostly though, I love the motion in the water. You picked just the right shutter speed. Sometimes in my photos I tend to overdo it, and blur the water too much. This is a good example of why it's often better to go with just a little bit of blur.
BenQuote:
Originally Posted by btaylor
Great shots, would it be possible to supply the settings. I have attempted lightning many times all with poor results, any help would be appreciated.
Absolutely!Quote:
Originally Posted by Raid
To be honest getting a shot of lightning starts with a bit of trial and error, once you get it all dialled in though it's quite easy from there. I was very lucky last night as there was a ridiculous amount of activity in the sky.
The way I try to do things is to use shutter speed to expose the scene using the ambient/available light and use both ISO and aperture to control the exposure of the lightning.
For the first shot I was at ISO 160, 13sec exposure and I'm pretty sure it was f/8.0. Because the Samyang 14mm is manual aperture and doesn't read back to the camera I don't know for certain, however I was generally sliding between f/8.0 and f/11. If there's a lot of ambient light and you don't want too much movement in the clouds etc you can speed up your exposure a bit down to, say, 5sec for example. You should still be exposing correctly for the lightning as before since ISO and aperture have the biggest effect on that component of the shot.
For the bottom shot (with the fire in the background) I was shooting at ISO 400 for a 30sec exposure and again at around f/8.0 to f/11. I had the ISO bumped up here as the lightning was much further away and hence needed the extra sensitivity to expose the lightning correctly. This could also be achieved through opening up the aperture a bit. For the foreground here I was simply light painting with a torch.
So once you get your settings where you want them, just sit it on a tripod with a remote shutter release and let it keep ticking over.
Not exactly too scientific but hopefully this gives you a decent starting point.
edit: SHOOT RAW
I agree with Jonathan, that water is absolutely amazing. Wasn't there an assignment recently to capture an image with a bunch of different focal points? This would have been perfect. There are just so many cool things to look at in that image (the sky, the waterfall, the silhouette), but the water definitely takes the cake. That would be an excellent wall piece.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jonathan Huyer
Another from the other nighthttp://farm9.staticflickr.com/8209/8...f81a5405_b.jpg[/url]Super Storm by Ben__Taylor, on Flickr
Amazing shot Ben, love the clouds and the multiple bolts.
That's an awesome multi-exposure shot.
Ben - I really like the that last one... cool composite.
Erno - When you can get a shot where an 80 foot waterfall is dwarfed by the grandeur of the other elements of the shot, then you know you have something special. Nicely done.