Last year after spending two hours at St Peter’s Church graveyard in Boughton monchelsea (it overlooks a massive field of deer and you can see for miles in the direction of Dungeness etc) followed by a further three hours driving to and from Ramsgate chasing the lightning, we ended up coming home with absolutely no lightning shots whatsoever.
One positive take away though, was that it made me more conservative with my attempt this year, staying local and keeping it simple!
It also taught me how to track the lightning by watching its movement on the WeatherRadar app and to plan a shooting location exactly in line with the path of the storm.
Jump forward to now and I was sitting indoors at 11 pm watching the radar showing that the storm is moving in from the south-west.
I didn’t want to go far after last year and I also wanted to find somewhere I could shoot from my car, I didn’t really fancy getting soaked or the possibility of being struck by lightning on this occasion :-)
A quick browse through my saved locations in the app PhotoPills and I quickly realised that Detling barn which is only a 15 minute drive away was facing the correct direction (South West) with plenty of view to the left and right also.
Within 10 minutes of arriving and setting up my camera on the back seat, I had already captured the lightning! Within 45 minutes I was on my way home, largely because the rain was blowing quite horizontally and my lens and car were getting soaked!
I originally started taking shots on my Panasonic S5 under the live composite mode which means that you can keep continuously exposing and it will record only new light and show you a continuous preview on the back of the camera. It’s a great feature and what makes Panasonic cameras unique. I’ll probably make a post one day about how it works more thoroughly.
On this occasion, after a couple of strikes, one very close I realised that it can quickly blow out the whole frame and ruin strikes already recorded. I then decided to keep exposures to circa 1 minute. The image here is 3 shots blended in Photoshop.
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