Lightning Appearing to Strike Twice

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Lightning Appearing to Strike Twice

I’ve had little success with long exposures. Our last night on the beach, there was a little bit of lightning. I spent an hour doing 30 second exposures. This shot was the best one by far. I love that you can see a couple dining on the beach with a spotlight as well as people looking for crabs along the shoreline.

This is pretty noisy, but I love the double fork of lightning and the cloud formation. Utah doesn’t deliver quite the same thunder/lightning that other parts of the U.S. can bring. I had hoped for 20 or 30 shots I could pick the best from, but alas, it didn’t work out that way.

I used this, wrapped around the deck rail to hold the camera and the 24-70 2.8L lens. It works well as a headdress, sure, but as a grippy camera thingy, it did very well, despite making Heather extremely nervous that our camera was being held four floors up by the Gorillapod.

This is a full manual shot, with aperture and exposure all dialed in by me. I tried to shoot it at 100 ISO, but 500 yielded a bit more detail and light in the foreground, especially because I wanted a higher f-stop (this shot is f11) for a broader depth of field.