Too Young To Be Grumpy

The weather in the UK has been glorious for the past week. However, due to the weather systems we get over here glorious weather always ends with a bang, and I love it when it does.

Last night was no exception. I was out applying the slug nematodes to our vegetable patch last night and was also admiring the clouds in the sky. There was a layer of alto/cirro-stratus (very high blanket cloud) which the Sun was stuggling through to cast a strange pinky-yellow hue over the garden. Underneath the stratus, cumulus clouds were building. This is pretty unusual and usually signifies a storm, which seemed even likelier considering how humid it was.

Soon after I heard a faint rumble.

"Was that thunder?", I asked Daisy.
"Didn't hear it."

I moved round the house and could see a dark ominous cloud sitting on the horizon. The butterflies in my stomach began to flap. I love storms!


Storm building in the south-west.

Later that evening, as we were off to bed, Daisy was locking up the doors and said "woo scary, lightning". I leapt out of my chair, although I didn't plan on taking photos unless the storm was producing a decent amount of lightning. I quickly headed out the door, and a cloud-to-cloud fork flickered across the sky. Whoooooooaaa. I had to get my camera and stuff.

I gathered my camera and snapped it onto my tripod, flinging the legs out to their fullest extent, as quickly as I could. I rushed outside and began snapping.

Daisy was a bit frightened for me being out in the storm, but it just gives me a massive buzz. There's really nothing like it. Particularly when you know you've just got a good photo. At least I only have to wait a few seconds to find out, and not a week.


Wrath of the gods.

This actually brings me to make an observation about digital cameras, and their night-time exposure capabilities. At the end of a long exposure (that photo above was 20 seconds) the camera has to read all the charge off the CCD and create a picture from it, and this can take a long time. On my D70 this can take about 15 seconds for a 20 second exposure. This means that if you shoot continuously, you're only actually capturing pictures about 60% of the time. This can be important in the situation of a lightning storm! I must've missed about 3 good photo opportunities because my camera was busy flashing "Job nr" at me, as it compiled the previous picture. The solution this this is to have 2 cameras and while one's reading the image, the other can be capturing - although that might be a bit over the top :o)

[Edit 27th June 2005: I've since read that this is due to the noise reduction systems. If you take a 20 second shot, the camera takes another 20 second shot with the shutter closed (effectively a black photo). This shows up any 'hot pixels' on the CCD, which it then subtracts from the original 20 second exposure. It also applied a light median filter to the image. You can get around these by turning the camera off during this second exposure. The camera has already stored the original exposure, so there's no worry about losing your image. I found out this information from Christian Buil's page about D70 astrophotography.]

When it began to rain I went back in (with a little friendly persuasion), but I didn't want to stop taking photos, so I went into the lounge and took some through the lounge window.


Storm watching, undercover

Eventually I got tired and had to retire to bed, but my heart was still pounding with the adrenalin and it was hard to get to sleep, particularly after I asked Daisy why she was in bed fully dressed, and she said to me, "If the house gets hit and burns down I won't be outside in the nude."