{"id":1445,"date":"2011-06-09T12:00:19","date_gmt":"2011-06-09T16:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/?p=1445"},"modified":"2011-06-09T11:59:33","modified_gmt":"2011-06-09T15:59:33","slug":"the-thunder-rolls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/2011\/06\/09\/the-thunder-rolls\/","title":{"rendered":"The Thunder Rolls"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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!<\/p>\n

\"Purple<\/a>

Purple Rain<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Reach<\/a>

Reach for the Sky<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Here<\/a>

Here Comes Thor!<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Lightning<\/a>

Powering the Tree of Life<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

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…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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!<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,47,17],"tags":[284,280,281,285,613,282],"class_list":["post-1445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-information","category-nature","category-photography","tag-landscape","tag-lightning","tag-storm","tag-summer","tag-tips","tag-weather","category-8-id","category-47-id","category-17-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1445"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1452,"href":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1445\/revisions\/1452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}