Capture Every Lightning Strike with This Clever GoPro Hack

In the past, we’ve featured some great posts about making sure you capture those epic lightning strikes that frolic through the sky like hyperactive children – like this one. (It’s okay…I’ll wait while you check it out. Maybe grab some KFC on your way back?)

Photographer and photo-hacker (can we just shorten it to “phacker,” already?!) Saulius Lukse recently published a post detailing how, using a GoPro and Python script, you can not only capture a whole string of lightning strikes but isolate the individual frames as well.

The idea is to get a GoPro rolling at 1080p at 60 frames per second and let it go throughout a storm or series of strikes. The footage is then run through a Python script that automatically detects spikes in motion and provides a readout of the frames in question. The frames can then be isolated and compiled into a single image, converted to an animated GIF, or simply plucked from the video and used natively.

The Result

Check out the full post, complete with Python script (to make your ambitious life that much easier) here:

[Lightning Strikes and Python | Saulius Lukse]

Greg Urbano

cool
mike

“with this clever gopro hack”
We are not Buzzfeed, we don’t need stuff like that in the title.

That said, this is really fantastic.
- Allen Mowery
  
  Thanks for the feedback! I will keep that in mind for the future…seriously.
Rick

Wow, so not even close. All the script is doing is culling frames from the video. If you really want to capture lightning with a GoPro hack a Hiviz lightning trigger (http://hiviz.com/kits/lt2.htm) into the shutter button (which is not as difficult as it sounds but will definitely void the warranty). This way you get a true 12mp image not just a 2mp screen grab.
- -z
  
  The delay from pushing the shutter button on a gopro to it actually taking the photo is too large for your idea to work.. it takes almost a second. The moment would be gone.