God light paints too.....

It's called lightning and it's quite deadly, but lots of fun to photograph. I was out for about 20 minutes last night and got my "holy grail" of a picture before the rain started to pour. My trick was to set the camera to Manual, use auto focus on the lens to find a light far away and focus on it, set it to manual focus, set the aperture to 5.6 and set the shutter speed to 30 seconds. I zoom out as far as possible to get as much sky, I point it up so there's very little land (it's just black anyway and a waste of space) and then start shooting. It was a real trick to guess where the next strike would be, the storm was all around me.

Here are my two best shots.....

Light Painting

Light painting is fun! It requires a camera, tripod, and a light source. I had 2 different flashlights and a flash that I could turn into a strobe. It also should be dark outside. In a nutshell, I set my camera to be open for 30 seconds (slow shutter speed), about f/8 to f/10 aperture, ISO 100 and just jump in front of it with my lights. I can draw in the air with the flashlight pointing at the camera or "paint" something else I see. Here are my results......





We came across some skater boys, they were very interested in what we were doing and I asked them if they'd hold my flashlights while skating. They were awesome!








One of my favorite shots, I painted the bridge with my bright light.




Here's a neat tutorial on how to light paint....


And a really neat video of some people who obviously love light painting...

The love tree - in HDR

I am quite fond of this heart in the tree so this time, I took a few shots and made it into an HDR image.