The perpetual photography thread

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i would love to take pictures of lightning, unfortunately it is somewhat rare in denmark, when we have them they only last 10 minutes, how do you get the timing right?

as for the grainy, it happens when very bright lights shine directly onto the chip, the sun, lightning aand the like can do it, you can see it on the above hdr picture even at iso 100.

I have some I have taken on an iPhone 4 (not my usual means of photography at all.) I am currently near Charleston, South Carolina, so that is the location of these pics.


I took this yesterday; it was while crossing a bridge (as if that isn't obvious...)



Another bridge-crossing pic.

My favorite of the bridge-crossing photos.



Now the beach.

It's pretty good, and it's a great technique - you know that with the sun where it is the scrub at the rear of the field would just be black!
I've played with the CS3 equivalent of what's become much more refined in CS5, but had too many problems with the 'halo effect' - as round the tree on the left.
What little I've done with HDR I did with this: http://www.hdrsoft.com/ and - at least compared to CS3 - it was much easier to control these artifacts.

Somewhere I may have a presentable offering of my experiments with it. Somewhere... (rummages though disk...)

The bridges are all good, but this is just out-and-out beautiful.
Love the colour change and masking on all of them.

Thanks; it's a great app for the iPhone 4 (or any iPhone/iTouch/iPad with a camera) called "Hipstamatic." Goes on the basics of lomography, and unlike most of the cheap digital things that "lomographize" your photos, this app actually takes into account the lighting/contrast/subject etc. of the photograph, and displays it appropriately. So you get that classic lomographic feel when you take a picture on a sunny day; tons of orange.

@cornflake wow that program really does look nice, i have often thought that the amount of customization in CS5 could be better, but at least you can remove the halo you are talking about(you can do loads of customization, but hdr pictures can be very tricky to compose so more is always better), i simply liked how it made the trees "pop" maybe a bit over done, thank you for the opinion.

@nixon, i love that beachhouse picture and the effects you have used.

Those are all really good pictures that you've all taken.

@Oodain: Yep, it's very good and a doddle to use. The examples shown on the site are really impressive.
The ones I made used seven exposures. Looking back that was completely over-the-top (things weren't that dynamic!) but at least I had plenty of range to play with.
On a vaguely related note - have you seen/used Lightroom (also Adobe)? That does wonders for the processing workflow and simplifies many things. It also incorporates an excellent image library management system.

@jmnixon95: Thanks for that information - very useful, and I've found several Photoshop-related articles on the technique. It seems fairly easy to do.

It's a beautiful world after all!

I just opened the shutter on the "bulb" setting, waited until there was a bright flash, then released. I just propped the camera up on the dash and shot through the window. You can tell that I didn't keep it completely still as the street/house light moved slightly in the frame.

In a bright semi-urban area like I was in you can't really have the shutter open for more than 10 seconds or the ambient light starts to bleed in. Getting a good lighting bolt in the frame in any given 10 second period was mostly luck. It helped that the storm was pretty active with lightning bolts hitting close by (less than 2 miles) and in the same general direction every 20 seconds or so.

I didn't dare open the window or get out of the car with that much activity though. The rain on the car window blurred/distorted the lightning a little bit if you look closely.

i just got my arduino so once i learn using it i am thinking of doing a miniature lightning release for my d80, on hackaday there is an article of one in great detail IC based lightning detector

i would then replace the PIC microcontroller with this development board Arduino nano

later i could program it with different sensors for different purposes, i would like to incorporate an infrared motion sensor as well.

obsessive interests

unfortunately there is a lot of light pollution in denmark so i am afraid the bulb setting would be hard to use, but i dont know, been a year since i saw lightning last.

I bet that cake would taste as good as it looks.

If you took these, I will tell you right now that they are straight-up awesome.