Was an early morning yesterday, I was up before the dawn…
- Supertramp: Goodbye Stranger

Recently I’ve been attempting to get up quite early in the morning to get a head start on the day and make sure that I get a full day. I’ve noticed that I also seem to a) work better, and b) feel better about the day by doing this, which is a nice thing.

Today I got up even earlier than my normal (which has been 5:30-6:00 am) and was up at around 4:30 due to the fact that it was storming outside. Ever since I’ve seen pictures of lightning I’ve wanted to try and capture one, so I was up out of bed fairly quick and got the camera gear together.

Now, if you’ve ever tried to take pictures of lightning, you’ll realize that there’s one common factor: it’s hard! I was ultimately thwarted by 3 factors:

1. Lightning strikes were too far apart (and of course, impossible to predict) so even managing to hit a strike was going to require a bit of luck.
2. There’s way too much ambient light where we live. To capture of flash of lightning you need a fairly low f-stop, combined with a long exposure time (since you’ve got to just have the shutter open when the lightning strikes). With all the extra light coming in I was going to need to crank the f-stop up way too high to get a decent picture, or use really short exposures and hope I got really lucky.
3. Combined with the previous point, the sky also started getting light since it’s so soon after the summer solstice, and began thwarting my attempts.

All in all, it was a “failed” attempt at getting a lightning photo, but I still had a lot of fun trying to get the picture, so I think it was worth it. It also means I now have a better idea for in future.

Anyway, I’m now at the coffee shop and working, so here’s a picture in lieu of some lightning.