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Well I'm not sure the chase this day is even worth mentioning. I picked the southern target(it was a tough choice) and it simply fired too late(right at sunset). So I wound up sitting in Columbus for 4 hours looking at data with Steve Peterson. Around 6 I head east to stay with the boundary and encounter the storms eruprting in a line ne and sw of Omaha. I go down I-80 towards Lincoln to intercept the larger storms being overtaken by the cold front there. I didn't have much choice as I knew I couldn't catch any of the storms firing right ahead of me. Just after leaving the Greenwood exit I encounter a storm forming right ahead of the line. I blew it off as I wasn't sure it would do much and the ones to the sw near York were now tornado warned. This storm near Lincoln was very electrified and seemed to have a cool looking vault area. Welllllll, this turns into the impressive supercell that gave west Omaha a bit of a scare. The storm had very strong low level shear and there was a report of a tornado at 180th and Harrison. I could see the storm as I raced back up I-80, but never could catch it.
The other target this day was se SD. A few tornadoes were produced up in that area. Oh well. I'm pretty sure had I been up there I would not have driven south(past home) and shot this last night of the 911 memorial lights. With the cold front full of storms just west of Omaha I knew I had to try to get a bolt with the beams and skyline one more time. I tried the night before with no luck. This time I tried the west side, looking to the east. I made it down town with a few minutes to spare before the storms would arrive. This is the new First National Bank building with the beam shining on the clouds above. This was handheld out my driver's side window(gotta love 1600 ISO). I did noise supression in the raw conversion and then again with Neat Image. I'm not sure what the red is on the left side but it might be the fountain down there that changes colors.
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The Woodmen building which is just east of the First National. I had to download a plug-in for photoshop to correct barrel distortion. The distortion at this angle was pretty huge and took some tweaking. It's not perfect yet but I was losing too much of the image from turning the perspective of it.
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I'm driving around looking for a good spot to shoot. I'm not a downtown person and never thought about the tops of parking garages.
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Handheld while stopped at a light. I had found one parking lot but there was a big building too much in the way. The storm hit as I was there so I sat it out. I then thought, hey, I'm wasting time that I'm going to need, so I left and drove around in the rain looking for a spot. This was almost a mistake as some areas had a whole lot of water flowing down the street.
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I found a spot.....sort of. I was driving west on Dodge when I decided to turn between two buildings and see if there was any view. I then see these elevated parking lots. The one to the right had a sign saying private, so I went left onto this one. I couldn't see any sign saying stay out on this one. To be safe I shut my head lights off as I pulled up on it, lol. The problem was the First National building is largely blocked. You can see the top of it sticking up above the building left of center. This was the best I had found and I knew I wouldn't have much time to get the shot/s. I shot several here before I thought, duh, might want to drive over to the other side so the roof isn't showing.
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After getting rid of the sprinkles and getting the camera properly focused I thought I was set to get some good bolts with this very cool scene. It was much harder than I thought. I was downtown right ahead of the storms at 10:00 and I was still up here shooting at 1:30 a.m.! With lightning at a bit of a distance, and being short duration as well, one has to have a pretty wide open aperture to catch it. Having a lit up downtown skyline means if your aperture is open you are going to have to use short shutters. Most of the images below were at F/5.0 and about 15 seconds long(ISO 100). This one here I stopped the lens down some and did a little longer exposure to get the sky blur. There were no visible lightning bolts so I figured I might as well do a few of these.
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This exposure was shorter than the 15 seconds and open at F4 so that the tail-lights of the traffic would show. You can see a white streak part way up the left beam. There were several birds constantly flying in and out of the lights, catching bugs I assume.
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After really no activity I get a small weak little storm running up north behind the cold front. The bolts with it were very short duration and not that bright. This was almost my goal, but actually I HAD to get a real bolt with the beams, or I would not be happy. I shot about 200 timed exposures of this over those couple hours. The lightning was so pathetic I wasn't even missing anything. There just wasn't anything to catch and it was so annoying! I knew each minute that past hope was running out(cold front storms were probably half way to Des Moines at this point).
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Another sad excuse for a lightning bolt from that sad excuse for an updraft behind the front. Thank god for that photoshop plug-in as it really helps these images. Without it the things on the side of the frames appear to be tipping inward.
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It was highly annoying to be getting some flashes again and have it all blocked out by these clouds. Since I was snapping image after image, I would have to stop and quickly erase them from the card. I was troubled that I was surley going to miss "the one" while doing this.
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Aaarrrrgh so close, but it still sucks!
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Bright flash lights up the whole sky but really no visible bolt for me.
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The beams are getting brighter and brighter....because the air was becoming drier and drier so far behind the storms now! I've been at this for a long time now, still not getting a decent bolt.
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Winner! Finally! That was the best, most visible bolt of the whole thing! It's not great, but it is good enough to qualify for what I wanted to accomplish. It is funny how I got it too. Getting very tired of having to go back and delete frames I decide to try and just "quick draw" them. I had the cable release in my hand and would just hit it the second I saw any flicker. I was just quick enough to get it. I knew when I pushed it down I had it. That is coming out of some pathetic updraft well behind the line.
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Thanks to some more sprinkles I am again hand holding a few shots.
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One bright flash from something out there before I call it a night. The bolt causing this could not be see either(well you can make out part of one branch...barely). |
