A surreal look at lightning captured at 7,000 frames per second
May 27, 2016
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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Lightning is one of those that subjects many of us have tried to photograph at some point or another if we live in an area where it happens. It’s one of those topics that seems almost too well documented. There’s a million different methods and techniques to try and figuring out which one works the best can only be discovered by actually giving it a go.
Professor Ningyu Liu at the Florida Institute of Technology’s Geospace Physics Laboratory has taken things a little further by capturing a recent lightning storm at 7,000 frames per second, showing the majestic beauty of lightning as it steers towards the earth.
The music might seem a little dated, but it’s an enchanting look at how lightning falls from the skies, and then erupts the instant any part of it touches the ground.
What’s interesting about these images is that they show something that would be virtually impossible to get without a super high framerate camera. Human reaction times are just too slow, and you’d have to be able to almost predict the future to account for shutter lag.
Sure, it’s possible we’d be able to get a single frame of something like this on a DSLR, but you’d have to be one of the luckiest people alive to get the timing just right that your exposure would line up with a strike in mid-flow. It wouldn’t be something you could guarantee consistently, that’s for sure.
It’d be interesting to see what some slow motion experts like the Slow Mo Guys would be able to show us from lightning strikes.
[via Bokeh]
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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3 responses to “A surreal look at lightning captured at 7,000 frames per second”
Having a bad case of nostalgia right now…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4zF790DzyQ
You do not need to predict the future. Not even almost.
Shutter lag is about 60ms in halfway decent D-SLRs (mirror-up mode, since flipping the mirror takes additional time), duration of a flash incl. afterglow is about 100ms. Conclusion: Take a microcontroller, do the shot. Some details here: http://www.techphotoblog.com/tpb1-lightning-photography/.
Option B would be just to bruteforce it: Open shutter, wait. Typically, during a thunder storm, the scenery is quite dark between two subsequent lightning strikes so you get a decent exposure time, often several seconds. If you use a photodiode to detect a lightning strike (and a microcontroller again), you can automatically close the shutter after n events and/or a predefined time to avoid overexposure. Repeat.
Advantage: You also capture what you would miss during shutter lag using option A. Disadvantage: You might end up with a lot of useless images to discard.
This video shows the downward leaders preceding what we perceive as a lightning stroke. The actual stroke of lightning is the few completely blown out frames in each sequence.
If you use a microcontroller to take photos of lightning or leave the shutter open until the stroke hits, you’re only going to get the stroke, not the leaders. Getting a shot of the leaders would require being unconscionably lucky … or using a very high-speed camera as here.
Fascinating video.