I promised a friend I would post this image as well.
The bolts of lightning strikes down on Oslo. I used the evening and early night standing on my porch until the heavy rain forced me to go inside. I was considering setting up my camera to continue shooting through the night, recording pictures on my computer, but the sheer amount of pictures I would have to go through in the morning made me think otherwise.
Another good one. The ground is very dark. Would you have been able to use a longer exposure to lighten it up a bit?
The ground is too dark. I know. I might have some pictures taken from the view with lighter ground, but I generally don’t like combining pictures. Brightening will probably not work in this case, but I will give it a shot just in case.
I tried many different combinations of aperture and shutter before I got the mood in this picture. Overall, I don’t think the image is to dark, but the ground certainly is. The brighter images just seemed too bright in the sky, loosing that intimidating mood I was going for. I’m not sure why, but it seems I have lost a great deal of quality somewhere in the process. Do you know if YAPB reduces quality a lot when resizing an image?
Wow! Awesome thunder and lightning shot! I don’t think that the ground is to dark. I like it this way, because it really is focusing you on the lightning. A lighter ground may distract with the details.
Hi X, We agree that the sky is just right, and our question was really if all the light in the sky is from the lightning. Because if it was, you could get a lighter ground with no penalty of a lighter sky. Brightening will probably not work, as there is no information there.
Yes, in our experience YAPB diminishes quality. We generally re-size in PS (using bi-cubic sharpening) to 800 pixels on the longest axis and sharpen AFTER resizing. We would have liked to post higher resolution pictures, but have not found a way (let us know if you do).
Hey, I’m still XmasB? That’s not right. Not here anyways. Will fix that right after this comment.
Thanks, Henrik. It’s always good to hear opinions from both sides.
I could probably produce a similar picture with a lighter ground (not now of course) by letting in more light, but the first tries with more light also gave brighter clouds. It might have been better to have a brighter image, and darken the clouds in PS. I’m still new to PS. When I’m taking pictures I try to get the result I want right away, and forgetting that I can adjust simple things like this in PS. The result, of course, is that I sometimes lose detail when trying to get the picture just right.
I have to look into YAPB’s behaviour with resizing. I want to keep the large version close, in case I’m going to change the size or theme, allowing larger pictures.
And now, to change my name on this site.
Ah, that’s better.
I like the focal you use, that included the light of the city and dark of the clouds. Also I like the light comes out from the clouds. Nice shot.
Thanks, Bob. As the thunderstorms drew nearer, I was forced to go more and more wide to get everything in. It’s more or less impossible to predict where the lightning will strike, so I have to give some credit to pure luck in these shots as well.
I have one issue with this image, and it’s a technical one, since the composition, colors etc. are beautiful. The ground looks just fine as it is.
To the point: I see quite a bit of noise in the blue part of the image, to a degree that I find it disturbing. I suppose it’s not there due to high ISO, or am i wrong? Or is YAPB to blame?
Or am I the one to blame since I feel a bit too critical?
I just checked the unedited RAW file, and even this had quite a bit of noise. When adjusting the white balance this noise became even more apparent. I’m not sure why this is. YAPB also degrades the image somewhat when resizing, so future pictures will be uploaded in the right size.
If I didn’t want to receive some critic, I wouldn’t let people comment on my pictures. Critic is what forces us to learn and become better, so don’t be afraid to tell me what you don’t like with a picture.
Excellent – Like planting a tree, or having a child.. – the image one should take before he die !!
Amazing shot!
Thanks, guys!
Great photograph. I am pleased that you promised your friend to upload it a share it with us.
Thanks, Mark! Sorry for the late reply… It normally takes me less than a day to answer, not a year and a half.
WOW, what a awesome lightning images, fantastic, I love it!!! Keep on your good work, you are a great photographer
Thanks, Anne! Photographing lightning is more a test of patience and luck than skill me. I don’t know how many images I took that night, but it was a lot of work going through them all.