Bottling lightning

I have had a lifelong fascination with the weather…..that makes me sound a bit weird, let me try that again. I have had a lifelong fascination with thunderstorms…..yes, marginally less nerdy! Hearing distant rumbling always got me excited as a boy until I found out that most of the time it was just my Dad farting! But occasionally the rumbles would come from above, enveloped in huge dark thunderheads and often accompanied by a flash of intense light that would illuminate the clouds from within. If I got really lucky you would see forks of pure electricity streaking across the sky and snaking its way to a distant point of land, existing for just a brief moment but leaving an impression in my mind that would last a lifetime. I remember when I was a child and staring out of my bedroom window at night, excitedley awaiting the next flash and rumble, always trying to work out how far away the storm was by the time between the two.

Unfortunately though, here in the UK we dont get thunderstorms that often. I am sure there is some scientific reasoning behind this that I cant be bothered to Google but its just a fact we rarely see a good storm over here. Until a few nights ago….

I had actually headed off to bed despite reports saying we were due some thunder and lightning. The Met Office had even issued a yellow warning for it. Is that like yellow snow?? Anyhow, I had stayed outside until after sunset staring off to the horizon looking for clouds but it remained stubbornly clear and I eventually decided it wasn’t going to happen round these parts. Half an hour later my partner Jayne is calling up the stairs that she can see lightning just as I was dozing off under the duvet. I hurriedly exited the bed, tossing the duvet and the snuggled up cat aside and stubbing my toe on the ottoman as I rushed to dress myself and peer out of the bedroom window. And there it was, off to the south, a huge bank of cloud with flashes of lightning going off among the outriders. Oddly no thunder though.

I grabbed the camera gear and bolted down to the van(geddit?) It looked like the storm was forming right behind my favourite tree Lonely Joe so my first stop was there and sure enough it was behind the tree but heading right towards it! I have photographed Joe to death but the one thing I still hadn’t managed to get was a good storm going off above it. What made the scene even more special though was one side of the cloud was backlit by the rising moon, casting moonbeams across the night sky while the other side was being lit up by wave after wave of lightning. Incredible scene!

After this the storm appeared to be moving north east of me so I made the call to head over to a place in Wiltshire called the Deverills. A series of hills near Warminster that offer wide vistas of the surrounding countryside and great views of the skies. I decided to head to an Old Dutch barn that was right at the top of one of said hills with a lovely bridleway that went straight past it. I once again set the camera up on its intervelometer mode as this is the best way to capture lightning as the camera will constantly be taking images. The added benefit is you can stitch these series of images together to create the timelpases too! MY process is to capture 240 images at a time which makes for a 10 second timelapse at 24fps, the same speed as motion pictures are filmed in, to give it a real cinematic feel. Shutter speeds were kept at 2.5 seconds with an ISO of 400. A low ISO is important as you do NOT want to overexpose the lightning. Think of the lightning as a flash going off on your camera. It will briefly light everything up as clear as day so make sure you fire off a couple of test shots before doing anything like this to get the balance right for the lightning.

Lightning forking through the rain backlighting it briefly.

Whilst up near this barn I noticed two other stormcells, one to my left the other to my right but I reamained focussed on the one in front of me as that was by far producing the best light show. And then the wind changed directon and it started to head towards me and at that point I suddenly became painfully aware I was stood in the middle of three storm clouds, on top of a hill, in an open field, stood next to a carbon fibre tripod with a lump of metal on top of it……yeah, time to bail! I hastily packed up and headed back to the relative safety of the van but when I turned around (always look behind!) I could see a great composition so despite risking instant bbq I set the camera up again to get this shot

Despite everything kicking off its still important to get your composition correct.

I eventually got home at 3am and crept into bed, still awestruck with witnessing this almighty storm of the previous few hours. Its amazing how the little boy in me still gets excited by things like this!

I hope we get a few more storms like this over the summer. I am heading to France in a couple of weeks and every time I have been there we have had a thunderstorm of some description so hoping this trend continues.

In the meantime I am still available for workshops, either half day or full day. please feel free to get in touch if you are interested in some one to one tuition.

Thats it for this week, toodles!