Aug 062009
 

The new cameras ability to take long-exposure photos makes taking decent shots of lightning possible, so long as it’s lightning at night. One of the CHDK “hacks” for Canon allows for a “motion sensor” setting, where the camera will just stare at whatever until something moves, then snap a photo… and if that something that moved was a lightning bolt, then there ya go. But they don’t have one of those hacks for the SD960 yet.

Last night we had a hell of a lightning storm blow through. I set the camera on the tripod and tried to capture lightning via the expedient of pointing it in a likely direction and letting it take up to 15-second exposures. Unfortunately, after each exposure the camera needs to sit and process for a little while… the processing time being about the same as the exposure time. So fifteen seconds on, 15 seconds off.  And no kidding, most of the good lightning strikes happened when the camera was processing. So what I got was way less than half of what I could’ve. Oh well.

Here’re the better ones. Note that in the parts of the photos where you can see moonlit clouds, there is a lot of motion blur. Stormclouds can move pretty far in a 2-second exposure, never mind a 15-second exposure.

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 Posted by at 4:25 pm

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