It’s been a hot and humid week here in southern Ontario, reminiscent of the jungles of Central and South America! Ok, I might be dreaming a bit there (sigh), but all this hot’n’humid weather has resulted in some wicked storms in the evenings. Tuesday night featured one of the best displays of lightning I’ve ever seen; more than 80,000 lightning flashes were recorded by Environment Canada! After watching the storm passing over for almost an hour, it dawned on me that I should grab my camera and see what I could get out the window. After a bit of trial and error, here’s some of my favourites. Excuse the water droplets, I chickened out and shot through the windows rather than braving the storm outside!

Purple Rain

Reach for the Sky

Here Comes Thor!

Powering the Tree of Life

Is it just me or does that last image look like a phylogenetic tree snaking through the sky? Perhaps I’ve spent too much time in the lab lately…

All of these photos were shot with my 18-70 mm lens (at 18mm) on a Nikon D7000 body. I shot wide open (f3.5) and increased my ISO to 500 in order to record as much lightning as possible. As for the shutter speed, I played around with manageable speeds around 1/10 – 1.o seconds long, which wasn’t enough to get a proper exposure. I ended up settling on a 4 second exposure, which gave me plenty of opportunity to capture the random lightning strikes. The downside to such a long exposure? The smallest hand shake can introduce image-ruining blur, so I put both my elbows on the window ledge, controlled my breathing and concentrated on being very still. Of course, I should have used a tripod, but shooting through a window over the kitchen table at 1 am in the dark isn’t a perfect situation, so I made do and got lucky this time. Next time a high powered storm is forecast, I’ll be sure to be better prepared to take advantage!