I am just keeping this short because I really don’t feel like writing a lot right now.

The Dock at Veteran's Memorial Park in Edgewater, Florida.

A rock at Sunrise at Maynard May Park in Edgewater, Florida.

The climbing hermit crab at Maynard May park at Sunrise.

Oyster Covered Rocks at Sunset by JB's fish camp

More Oyster Covered rocks by Canaveral National Seashore at Sunset.

I was there for a little over Two weeks this time, and in that Two weeks, I took a little over 1800 photos.

I accomplished this by waking up every morning before sunrise, getting out on the Indian River Lagoon somewhere in Edgewater or New Smyrna, Florida and looking for an interesting scene to unfold while getting my camera gear prepared.

By being on the in-land side of the Lagoon, it gives me giant sweeping views to the East, and as we all know, the Sun rises in the East. This means that I have a short trip to get Sunrise photos on an almost daily basis while there.

When I am getting Sunset or Sunrise photos, I always hope for a good day that is at-least partly cloudy. As the Sun rises or sets behind clouds, there is always a better potential for a lot of good color. There were several days without clouds anytime at all, so I would compose photos on objects in the water, where I can get good reflections and good light. On the days when I did have these clouds, I would look for a good object in the foreground, and try to make sure my horizon was fairly straight while getting a good shot of the clouds at the same time.

Here are a few of the shots taken mostly from the Indian River Lagoon in the Edgewater area.

A hermit crab on top of a rock at low tide at Maynard May Park in Edgewater, Florida.

Sea-foam and sun rays over the Indian River Lagoon

A White Egret stands on a sandbar as the Sun rises in Edgewater, Florida.

The Sun trapped behind clouds in New Smyrna and Edgewater, Florida.

Another sun rise from Maynard May Park in Edgewater, Florida.

As I go through these photos from Edgewater, New Smyrna, Canaveral National Seashore, Bethune beach and all the other wonderful places that I took photos on my last trip, I will update them and probably spam my google+ and facebook feeds with these blog posts. There are a lot more for me to go through, and I am at-least going to try and keep a theme with each post. If anyone has any questions or comments on the photos that I take, always feel free to ask questions to leave feedback. I will reply as soon as possible and try to be as clear as possible.

Thanks!

Here are a few things that you need to get photos of lightning.

1. a good camera that can do at least a few seconds of long exposure.

2. a decent lens. A decent wide-angle zoom lens is optimal but I have shot with a normal prime before (not optimal, but acceptable).

3. a tripod

If these are the only things that you have, you are kind of restricted to taking photos of lightning in the night. It is possible to get day time shots, but it is not practical by any stretch of the imagination. The reason for this is that in the night you are taking photos of the actual light that the lightning produces and hoping to get a little exposure of the ambient landscape, where in the day, you have ambient light, and you are hoping a strike happens when you are taking a photo.

What I mean is that in the night, you are taking basically a long exposed landscape photo. During this long exposure, you hope the lightning strikes. If it strikes while this long exposure it being made, you will have a photo of lightning. That is the entire concept of night time lightning photos. In the day, you may shoot at ISO 100 at F22 and still be shooting 1/60 of a second. That isnt a lot of time for a lightning strike to happen, where Four second, six or even eight seconds is a lot of time for a lightning strike, even several of them to happen in your frame.

When I am shooting in the night, and not using my lightning trigger, I will take the time to find out which way a storm is coming from. When I look at a weather radar, I try to think of places that will put me in the path of a storm that will contain a lot of lightning. I find a place with a nice view of the direction and set up my tripod. I will make sure that my camera has a decent zoom lens. Since I use a Nikon D300s for lightning and various film cameras, I will narrow this down to just using the Nikon D300s. The zoom lens that I personally use is a 18-200.

Mount the camera on a tripod. Next turn off your auto-focus. Get your lens set at “infinity” on your focus. If you cant figure out where this is, or your lens doesnt show it well. Turn your auto-focus back on, find a light way off in the distance and let to auto-focus do its job. When the light in the distance is in focus, turn off your auto-focus. There is no need to keep trying to focus and your camera hunting for focus in the dark. If the lightning is way in the distance, you can do two things now. You can either take long exposed shots of the landscape with the lightning off in the background, or you can zoom in and get photos of lightning. I generally start off with a 4 second exposure at ISO 200 at f/4. If any fine-tuning is needed, this is the time to do it.

As the lightning gets closer, personally I usually keep the shutter speed at 4 seconds and move my aperture more towards the f/5-f/8 area. When you have a smaller aperture, you will get more detail in lightning strikes that are closer.

As for making the actual shots, now.

I can NOT stress enough how important a sturdy tripod can be. When you are shooting lightning, there is a high probability that you will run in to high-winds. These give your tripod hell and if you dont have a sturdy tripod, you will have shaking blurred shots. We don’t like blurred shots of lightning. If you have an inexpensive tripod, look under it. There may be a hook hanging off the bottom. This is a great place to hang stuff that is heavy and increase the stability of your tripod. A paint can or jug of water works well.

When you are taking a long exposure, even on a tripod there is a good chance you can push the shutter button too hard and during a long exposure, you will shake the camera. You can either set a 5 second timer delay on your camera or get a remote to take a photo. These are prime for shooting in conditions like this. The 5 second timer will let you press the shutter and take a step back while everything gets stable and the camera can take its shot without your dumb human fingers messing everything up. The remotes, well they allow you to not even have to touch your equipment while you are taking photos.

If you are on a budget, just set the timer and stand back.

As storms get closer, I often change lenses to my 10-20mm which will let me get any action that is happening anywhere around me. If you are to this point that you have to use a lens this wide, you are more than likely in a very dangerous situation.

There is a high-likelihood that you are somewhere with electronic equipment in a lightning storm and in my case, usually the tallest thing around.

Go inside and be glad you are alive. Don’t get struck by lightning.

As for the white-balance issue with lightning photos.

A lot of the time, to get the natural look of the lightning, I will use the “incandescent” white-balance setting to get pretty blue lightning that looks very pleasing and natural. It will look a lot like the following photo.

Lightning on June 27, 2010

Sometimes, If you want pretty purple lightning, you can change your white balance to “fluorescent” and you will get lightning that looks like the next photo:

Lightning in September 2010 over the Ohio River.

And if you use the “flash, cloudy, or shade” white balance setting on lightning, you will get an angry fire looking strike, much like the following:

June 02, 2010 lightning on "Flash" white balance setting.

I guess this isn’t a tutorial as much as a guide-line on where to start. When you shoot lightning, you are in a very fluid-situation where you will have to make a lot of decisions as the storm gets closer to you. At the same time, you have to make 100% sure that you have concern for your safety while out with tripods and electronics.

These days, I shoot in every thunderstorm. I have thousands of lightning photos, several tornado photos, and I have increased my gear. One of the best things that I use now is a lightning trigger which allows me to get photos in the day-time as well.

Still, nothing compares to lightning shots in the night when the entire landscape lights up on a giant cloud-to-ground strike.

If anyone has any questions that I may not have covered here, feel free to ask and I will answer as soon as possible.

I have been shooting lightning in every storm I have seen since 2006. I have gone through every single heartbreak, trial and error possible while shooting lightning, and I would be glad to help anyone else who wants to get photos of one of natures most amazing and beautiful events.

We usually take a little 1 mile trail that is paved, but this time, we started on a new trail that wasnt paved. It was more of a path through a meadow and woods. The trail led to an old orchard that was a working farm at one time for a state mental hospital and we ended up somehow back at the exact same parking lot where we started.

While we were out, I was looking for good photos ops in the woods and on the paths.

I didn’t get shots of what I had hoped for, but did get some that I liked that do show some of the unique things that are in the park.

One of the trails that runs through Tom Sawyer Park in Louisville, Kentucky.

A bird-house in a meadow at Tom Sawyer park in Louisville, Kentucky.

A monster half-dead tree in Tom Sawyer Park in Louisville, Kentucky.

This car failed. I told Mark right away that he should take the car back to where it came from and get his money back. He said it would cost about $35.00 to fix. That was almost $1000.00 bucks ago.

After finding out that it needs a new head, he found one in the exotic and far-away land of Bedford, Indiana. This is a small town that is about an hour or so away.

Off we went!

While on the road, I spotted a couple of nice little barns that I wanted to get photos of, so on the way home, while the Sun was setting, we stopped and got some shots of them.

An old barn at sunset on the way home from Bedford, Indiana.

Another old barn on the way home from Bedford, Indiana.

In the wild, Rainbow trout are somewhat notorious for being hard-to-catch. This is because they eat a lot of bugs. These bugs have a short time through the season when they have a “hatch”. The “hatch” is a few days when the bugs go from being eggs to adults, when they eat and end up finding a mate and making little baby bugs. Next year, it happens all over again.

The trout will sometimes–only eat the bugs during that weeks hatch, which means you will not catch anything unless you have a bait that matches that hatch.

The trout that are grown in captivity work a little different. Instead of being born in fresh running streams of Montana and eating tasty bugs, they are given a special kind of food called “pellets”. These Pellets work much different than a “hatch”. Pellets are made by machines in a special place called a “factory”.  In this “factory” there are people which are called “employees”. These are generally low-wage workers who hate their jobs and they dump powders with nutritional value in to a bin that it attached to a machine which makes tiny orange balls that trout living in giant tanks will put in their belly so they become larger.

When these trout are large enough, they are put in a truck and dumped in to lakes.

The issue that I kind of have with this is that Trout are very delicate fish who have to have a lot of Oxygen in the water to live. When water is really cold, it has a lot more Oxygen than when water is really warm. When it gets about 78 degrees, there isn’t enough Oxygen for these Trout to live, so they suffocate and die.

Anyway, they stock these lakes with Trout which will eventually die of suffocation unless they are all caught and cooked.

My friends Matt and Tom both caught several Trout and a Bluegill at the #4 lake at Miles park today. The fish were small, but they were still Trout which is always nice to see.

I am just confused about the waste of dead fish that will eventually be found on the shores when the water temperature goes up.

While I was there, I did get a couple of photos. One was on an island in the Floyd Fork River and the other was of Lake #1 at Mile Park.

A giant fallen tree at Miles Park in Louisville, Kentucky

Lake #1 at Miles Park in Louisville, Kentucky.

I had been wanting to work on photos of scenes in the woods so I woke up, went out and roamed the woods until I found interesting places to get a shot. It seems like the best idea was to get out, look for good light filtering in through the trees and find a good subject thats well-lit and then get a good angle on it. This may mean laying or sitting on the ground.

The problem that I had with sitting and laying on the ground is that there are ticks this year. There are ticks every year, but this year is something special. The ticks have had their own baby-boom in their little parasitic species where instead of coming out of the woods, finding one or two ticks crawling on you, when you come out of the woods, there are 30-40 crawling on you and 3-4 already feasting on the nice warm sweetness of your mammal blood. This year is an epidemic of ticks and if you go in the woods, there is no escape. Also, don’t go out thinking that you will use deep-woods off or other deet related deterrents! This year, the ticks have developed an appetite for deet and will flock to you in droves. You basically are a giant Chinese Buffet walking through the woods and the ticks just left a Weight-watchers meeting. You will be screwed.

Beware and make 100% sure that you check yourself for ticks.

Mayapple plants on the forest floor in Western Kentucky.

By the way, I found that I do enjoy taking photos of the Mayapple growing in the forest here in Kentucky. If you have even been in the woods in this part of the world, I’m sure you are familiar with this plant in its little clusters when you look in the woods.

Mayapple as seen from the worms eye view.

The big old dead tree by the lake.

An old farm on top the hill.

I was out and up for storms both late in the night and early in the a.m.

Here are some of the shots of the weekend lightning.

A lot of Cloud-to-ground lightning in the distance.

Cloud-to-cloud lightning in the distance around the Louisville, Kentucky area.

A huge cloud to cloud lightning strike in Louisville, Kentucky.

Another very large cloud to cloud strike in the Louisville, Kentucky area.

Because of this living arrangement, I have a lot of access to people who have tattoos, are heavily tattooed, or they just got their first one and I do what I can to get good photos of the tattoos which looks great in all of the tattoo artists portfolios.

This week, since the storms are really firing up until tomorrow, I have been trying to get photos of people with tattoos who have been running in and out of the studio.

Here are a few shots I took this week using a two-light studio set up.

Rose tattoos done by mark.

A sun/moon tattoo done by mark, as well.

Another shot of the sun/moon tattoo

Tough girl with Disney tattoos.

While at the store, I decided to check the radar on my fancy Android Phone from the future which gives me nearly almost real-time 15 minute delayed radar and there they were! Big giant reflective storms that should have plenty of lightning and maybe some good rotation.

I hurried out and got in the field where I could get a good view of the direction the storms where coming.

At the time, it looked like a lot of small cells running parallel to each other, but they had plenty of power to make something good.

I was lucky that these were very slow moving storms. I was unlucky that the majority of lightning was embedded deep inside them and that makes it very hard to get good photos of lightning the way I like.

The Storm from a distance with lightning flashes with Jupiter high above the clouds

A small strike at the bottom in the trees.

The Orange color in the clouds is from the light-pollution of Louisville, Kentucky before I set the white-balance to compensate for harsh city lights.

Lightning striking after dark below the bottom of the wall cloud.

Two cloud-to-ground strikes below the bottom of the wall-cloud.

The insane wall-cloud that was sneaking up on me from behind.

The above and below photos are from the direction that I wasn’t watching. I was looking South-West where it looked like all the action was happening, and I felt a warm wet air hit me from behind. When I looked, there was this giant rotating wall-cloud that looked like it was just right above the tree-line. When the lightning would strike, it would illuminate everything behind it, but everything beyond the leading edge was jet-black. The entire scene was ominous, to say the least and one of the most beautiful things that I have ever seen.

The same wall cloud illuminated by lightning on the back-side.