How Often Is There Lightning In Carlsbad?

How often do you see lightning here? Never. That’s how often. Well, almost never. So these are a rarity. I only got a very few, and didn’t get to play with settings much, but the fact that I had a chance at all is kind of special.

The first couple with the 24-200 lens, the rest with the 20mm. I tried different apertures and opening times, but this was mostly a wild guess. Hold the shutter open 20 seconds or whatever and then hope the lightning… lightnings.

Behold!

Time Lapse tests from the you tubes

I have been creating videos with the z6, in no small part to give me fodder for learning the video editing software. I initially did a bunch of straight video recordings of the grass growing, emblematic of the of the arbitrarily imposed house arrest that leads me to be unable to find photographic fodder more varied than my yard, but the more interesting work has been to create time lapses of the weather.

Mirrorless is mostly fantastic, but it eats batteries at 3x the speed of my old body

We had a good series of storms blow through over the winter and as they came and went I set the camera up, catching clouds rolling in or clearing, sunsets, or anything else that seemed interesting enough to set the tripod up. I found some challenges and have been exploring them since. I am learning some tricks about exposure, especially during the difficult change from fill sun afternoon to sunset to post-sunset evening darkness. Battery management is… interesting, Mirrorless is mostly fantastic, but it eats batteries at 3x the speed of my old body, and mitigating the issue is hard with Nikon designing the absolutely stupidest possible battery pack. It holds two batteries but will only use one battery at a time and won’t automagically switch when the first battery is drained, so it has to be fooled into working long enough to take more than a few hundred frames. And the weather can be a challenge, lenses fogging internally in the cold and sometimes dew settling on the front glass as the cool sea air rolls in at night.

Night sky video is also interesting to me, though this close to the coast it’s rare to see stars through the light pollution and constant haze. I have yet to perfect the art of exposing the sky so it seems like night, but still shows as many stars as possible. I’m afraid I also don’ t have a fast enough wide angle lens. A couple of stops would be a godsend to low-ISO images, Luckily noise is relatively good at higher ISO on this camera, but still suboptimal, and by the time I get my f1.8 I’ll be better at night exposure.

If I could just figure out how to keep the lens from fogging up in the cool evening!

Here they are. All experiments, for good or bad. I should probably cherry pick my work so people think I know what I’m doing, but I don’t. So I won’t.

These were my first attempts at producing a video from time lapses and posting them to the you tubes

Second attempt at time lapse videos. Also took a shot at the title editor and made a title from scratch

Third try with the you tubes. Notice how terribly google compresses the night shots, leaving lots of blocky artifacts