Splitting Seconds

I shot these two frames roughly a second apart.  They were shot as RAW images on exactly the same camera settings, and have been exposed from the digital negative using identical parameters.  What this means, in short, is that the amount of light able to get onto each frame is the same.

The shot on top just happened to be taken as a tongue of lightning flashed through the thick monsoon clouds overhead.  The shot below, a second later when the lightning had faded.  This isn’t the most dramatic lightning shot ever.  And I really do want to get into photographing storms.  Especially as a good buddy of mine is a storm-chaser and meteorologist.  Gotta spend some time with him.  But I was pretty chuffed with how this worked out.  A bit flukey (though with the amount of lightning these storms bring, if you’re snapping around, sooner or later you’ll get a flash on film.  I should point out however that unlike the majority of lightning shots you’ll see, which are shot on tripods and over long exposures (at least a second or two), this was a handheld shot at around 1/15th of a second.  So it really was a bit lucky.  I liked that I was able to get two almost identical images so you can really see the difference in the sky with the flash.

That’s all.