THE ONLY SHOT OF LIGHTING I HAVE EVER GOT WITH A SIMPLE STILL CAMERA
Only a couple of months ago this storm passed over my house. It had lighting flying across the sky like nothing I have seen here before. This picture has been touched up slightly--but only so that there is not as much noise--the lighting is exactly the same as it was when incredibly I was able to capture a bolt of lighting in action with my DX--which is a compact camera so it is slower then a digital SLR and I would never think this would happen. My SLR was being recharged or something and I was out there video taping the lighting. I was going to use my video capture card to get pictures of the lighting from there--I still might--but this shot was incredible. It was all by chance and not by skill, as you can tell by the houses below--I had seen the first of a couple of flashes and began to move the camera over for the shot--giving just enough to catch the edge of this huge bolt which covered the sky. I was a bit afraid of the local electrical wires next to me--the lighting lit up the entire sky and it was one hell of a storm for out here. It is not very common to get a lighting shot this way. Usually a long exposure, sensor, or video or film motion picture cameras are used since even if a digital SLR it is very hard to know when to click. In any heavy storm you have a chance however--this was done with a compact camera--the fact that lighting comes in sheets and formations sometimes can tip you off to click your shutter button with your widest angle lens. I have been in storms where the lighting is constant. If I had not been to the Philippines and seen it for myself and then later I would not have believed it. A lighting storm so violent that you could read a news paper with it since there was literally constant lighting coming from the huge distant cloud. I mean constant. It was like 100s of mirrors hanging in the sun--or more like a constant fireworks. I watched the cloud from a taxi for only a short time, but over there these kinds of tropical storms are relatively common. Over there I hope to catch some far better shots just by the luck of my shutter finger.

This picture is from nearly the same angle--as you can see the mountains in the blurred background, this may give you an idea of how big this lighting was. This picture (BELOW)
shows the valley where all the clouds got lit up in this shot.




The "bully Bees" are still at it. Just today I got several more shots I have not processed yet. In RAW, you still have to convert the files into JPEG and stamp them with your signature and that's what "processing" .