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Lightning may strike anywhere, and getting the dramatic image on film is relatively easy compared to other nature photography situations. If you’ve been a photographer for a while, you’ve probably heard the old photographer’s secret of success: “f/8 and be there.” This is absolutely true when photographing lightning with one big exception. The f/8 is especially good, but you don’t want to be exactly there. Five miles away is close enough.

How to Photograph Lightning

THE HARD WAY

So how do you photograph lightning? If you have a place in mind that has a good vista, watch the weather reports and “be there” while the storm is passing.

The following procedure assumes a tripod, ISO 100 film speed, and a dark night sky:
1. Set the aperture at f/8.
2. Focus at infinity, and autofocus off.
3. Set the shutter speed at “B” or “T.”
4. Frame and aim the camera at the storm.
5. Hold the shutter open for one or more hits of lightning.

To photograph lightning during daylight is next to impossible. There’s too much light to slow down the shutter speed enough to capture lightning even under the dark clouds of a heavy storm. Lightning takes its own picture when and where it wants, and no matter how fast your reflexes are, it’s gone before the shutter opens. If an image happens, it is either an accident, or the photographer was lucky enough to have a very long sequence of lightning hits at the same place. Almost all daylight situations can be very frustrating.

The darker the sky, the longer the shutter is allowed to stay open at f/8. Therefore, your chances of getting a good photograph of lightning are best on a very dark night. In this situation you may leave the shutter open indefinitely and get multiple bolts in the same frame.

The intensity of the storm, your distance from it, and your film speed are variables. However, assuming the storm is approximately five miles away and you are using ISO 100 film, f/8 is the best aperture. Lightning will make an exposure at almost any aperture, but if you try to lengthen the exposure time by closing the aperture more, or by using neutral density filters, you risk getting images of the lightning bolts that are thinner than desirable. If the storm is more than five miles away, or filtered by smog, you might try opening the aperture to f/5.6. If it is closer than three to five miles try f/11, but think of your safety first.

Be near a storm with a wide horizon and a visible sunset (or sunrise). As the sky gets darker (or before the sunrise gets too light) your time exposure becomes long enough to better your chances of lightning striking while the shutter is open (anywhere between two and ten seconds). In this situation, take a meter reading of the sky at a point within the storm clouds not too far above the sunset (or sunrise), but out of the bright area. Then, keeping f/8 constant, cut the shutter speed in half (equal to decreasing the exposure by one full f/stop). In other words, if the meter calls for an exposure of f/8 at six seconds, then set the exposure time to three seconds. This should give you a dark blue/gray sky that fades into almost black. Take meter readings frequently; the light at these times of day changes fast. You will probably get only one or two decent images per roll of film, but that seems to be the case in most other situations of nature photography so don’t be too dismayed.

Now that you’re a pro at shooting lightning, try throwing some curves into play. Remember those filters? Use ‘em. Open your lens one half stop and stick that yellow in front. Wait a couple a bolts then open your lens an additional two and a half stops and put that #25 red in front. Next, try an #80A blue, then close it one stop and try a green. You could go on forever! All that work for one frame of film. When you get your photos back, they should resemble the surface of some unknown planet with multicolored streaks of lightning. Just remember to compensate your aperture for the varying densities of the filters.

THE EASY WAY

Photography with the Lightning Trigger is possible because a lightning flash is not a singular event. A flash is comprised of multiple strokes occurring over as much as several hundred milliseconds that are spaced approximately 40 milliseconds apart.

Camera Settings:

Camera Settings Quick List:

• Shutter speed priority mode
• 1/8 to 1/4 second exposure
• Single exposure mode
• Manual focus setting

Shutter lag time is an important consideration since you will want to capture as much of the lightning flash as possible. You should take advantage of reducing the lag time by manually setting the lens focus. A zoom lens is best since the location of a flash is usually not very predictable. Using a wide angle of view will help ensure that you capture the flash.

Take advantage of your camera’s metering system. Use standard methods normally recommended for lighting situations without considering the lightning flash.

Preset the camera shutter speed at 1/8 to 1/4 second to ensure that you capture the flash duration. Using a shutter speed faster than 1/20 second (50 ms) reduces the probability that you will capture a stroke on film. Single shot mode is recommended for most cameras. Multiple exposures are easiest to achieve at night.

Usually to achieve such a slow shutter speed, the lens will need to be stopped almost all the way down. This will also improve your depth of field. You may find during bright lighting conditions, minimum aperture is reached at a higher shutter speed. A polarizer or neutral density filter can be used to achieve a further 2 to 3 stop reduction. Be sure check your camera’s instruction manual so that you use the proper type of polarizer, i.e., circular.

LIGHTNING FACTS

• Lightning is actually hotter than the surface of the sun — in fact, it can be as much as three times hotter!
• An individual bolt can pack several hundred million volts at 10,000 amps, one trillion watts, briefly burning up more electrical power than is being used in the entire United States.
• To estimate how far away lightning is, count the seconds between seeing the flash and hearing the thunder. Each five seconds equals one mile.
• Lightning can be erratic. If you’re closer to it than five miles, you can be struck. Take proper precautions when you photograph lightning.
• Good common sense should tell you to stay away from the highest point, or to be under a tree that is likely to be hit and share the shock with you.

Good advice would be to make your photograph within fifteen feet of your car. Or think about using a radio control or infra-red remote while sitting in the car. If you are working at the tripod and you feel goose bumps, or the hair on the back of your neck suddenly tingles, it is a sign that lightning may strike nearby. Jump in the car immediately.

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Many dedicated Photoshop users can get substantial speed gains from their existing equipment by simply optimizing their computer and software so that it runs Photoshop more efficiently.

Here is a quick collection of speed-enhancing tips for getting the most efficient usage out of your software and computer:

Allocate a Scratch Disk
Photoshop uses RAM memory to run itself, store picture information, and to save undo and History State steps. Unless you are working with particularly small photo files it won’t take too many editing changes before the RAM is completely used up. At this point Photoshop cleverly uses a portion of hard drive space as “fake” RAM. This is not a new idea. Most operating systems use the same approach (called Virtual Memory) to ensure that enough memory is available for running essential programs. Photoshop calls this extra memory a “Scratch Disk”, and correctly setting up the disk will provide immediate speed and efficient benefits.

To set your Scratch Disk, select Edit>Preferences>Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks. Then choose a drive that has the most free space from those listed in the pop-up menu. If you have other drives listed you can also allocate these as extra Scratch Disks. Photoshop will make use of the drive listed first until it is full and then move to the next drive, even if more memory is needed. Most imaging professionals who regularly work with large files install a specific “fast access” drive just to be used as a Scratch Disk by Photoshop.

Set RAM percentage
Photoshop shares the RAM on your computer with the operating system (Windows or Mac OS X) and any other programs running at the same time. The percentage designated in the Photoshop Memory & Image Cache preferences determines the upper amount of RAM memory that can be used by Photoshop. Most new users push this setting as high as possible, some as much as 90 percent, thinking that this will speed up the processing of their files.

Unfortunately if this allocation is set too high, the operating system, as well as Photoshop, may need to move information from the fast RAM memory to the slower hard drive memory while processing. This action is called “page swapping” as the data is moved back and forth between the different memory spaces, and results in Photoshop actually running slower.

If you experience slower performance when raising the percentage of RAM allocated to Photoshop, try reducing the total amount to 50-60 percent for systems with up to 2GB, and 70 percent for computers with 4GB of RAM. Remember that you have to restart Photoshop after making any memory changes to ensure that these alterations will take effect.

Defragment your drives
As images and files are saved and resaved to disk they tend to become fragmented. This means that rather than the whole file being saved in one continuous space on the hard drive the information is broken into bits and stored in several locations (where ever there is empty disk space). Later, when the file is reopened, the document is reconstructed from each of the individual pieces. This file fragmentation slows down the opening and saving of files, as well as the running of programs such as Photoshop, if they were fragmented when initially installed. You can overcome this problem by regularly defragmenting the drives you use to store your images and load your programs.

To defragment a drive in Windows XP: Click Start>All Programs>Accessories> System Tools>Disk Defragmenter. Choose the drive to be defragmented and then select the Defragment button.

To defragment a drive in Mac OS X: Despite the fact that the latest version of Mac OS X contains automatic defragmentation of files smaller than 20MB, most Apple users prefer to defrag their drives with third-party utilities.

Minimize History States
The Photoshop History palette is a great feature, especially if you make mistakes as often as I do. Each successive edit is recorded as a step in the palette, enabling you to step back through the changes, gradually reversing your edits as you go. But this great feature does come at a cost. Each step uses memory resources and, when you make complex changes to large files, you can imagine how much memory is used to store a collection of steps.

Thankfully Adobe provides a setting in the Edit>Preferences>General dialog that can be used to alter the number of History States (or undo steps) stored by your system. By default it is set to 20, but if you find that Photoshop is running slowly after making a few editing changes then try reducing the number. Less History States does mean less opportunity to reverse editing changes, but this action frees up memory resources and can bring new life back to a slow running machine.

Reduce the number of open files
It may seem like stating the obvious, but the more pictures you have open in Photoshop the more of the total resources of the machine is taken up just maintaining each open file. When you add in the memory used to ensure undo or multiple History States for each file, it is not too hard to imagine that you will very quickly run out of RAM, forcing Photoshop to use the much slower Scratch Disk space. To speed up the processing, make sure that you only open (and keep open) files that are essential for your current editing task.

Run Photoshop by itself
A simple measure to speed up Photoshop is to make sure that no other programs are running at the same time. Seemingly simple utilities such as iTunes, Outlook, and Word all chew up memory and processor resources that could be used to drive Photoshop more efficiently. The golden rule is that if the program is not essential for the editing task then close the software. Click on the photo below to enlarge.

Alter the tile size
When Photoshop processes a photo it splits the picture into smaller image sections called tiles, and works on each in turn. By default the size of each of these tiles is 132KB. You can increase the amount of memory used for the processing of each tile by activating the Bigger Tiles plug-in.

To enable the Bigger Tiles plug-in: Close Photoshop and find the ~Bigger Tiles plug-in file in the following directories:
Mac OS: Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS2/Plug-Ins/Adobe Photoshop Only/Extensions/Bigger Tiles
Windows: Program Files/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop CS2/Plug-Ins /Adobe Photoshop Only/Extensions/Bigger Tiles
Now rename the file and in the process remove the tilde (~) from the title. Restart Photoshop. Now if you assign from 261MB to 1GB of RAM in the Memory & Image Cache preference, the tile size increases to 260KB. Increasing the allocation to more than 1GB increases the tile size to 1MB. Larger tile sizes reduce the amount of time Photoshop takes to process an image, especially on computers with more than 1GB of RAM.

Scratch Disk vs. Virtual Memory
Both Photoshop and the Windows XP operating system use hard drive space as extra “fake” RAM. Adobe recommends that Photoshop Scratch Disks be positioned on a different drive to the one used by Windows for its Virtual Memory system. On most setups the Windows swap file is stored on the Startup or C drive. To help with overall Photoshop and Windows performance, ensure that you don’t position the Scratch Disk on the same drive. To set the location of your Scratch Disk select Edit>Preferences>Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks and choose the drive to use from the drop-down menu. Remember don’t select Startup or C drive unless you have no other choices.

Alter the Image Cache setting
Photoshop uses a special Image Cache to help redraw high-resolution images quickly. Instead of displaying all the information contained in these big files, Photoshop creates lower-resolution versions of the photo that are then used to update the screen quickly.

You can elect to store from 1-8 cached versions of the photo. A value of 1 disables the caching. Higher values store multiple versions of the file, which in turn produces faster screen redraws. The default setting is 4, but inputting higher numbers will help speed up the redraw process.

When a high cache number is set, it will take longer to open files as Photoshop creates the low-resolution versions of the photo at this point. To alter the Image Cache setting select Edit>Preferences> Memory & Image Cache and enter a value from 1-8 in the Cache Levels text box.

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Making sense of all the online photo services can be just as difficult as picking out a camera and lenses. With all the options out there, it’s important to choose the right site for backing up and printing out your precious masterpieces. Whether you’re looking for a photo community, a place to develop your shots, or just a site to share your photos with friends, there are plenty of options to pick from. But choosing the right site to upload your all your photos to is a big decision since you will spend a lot of time and potentially money once you go down a path. So choose your path wisely.

Here’s a comprehensive look at the best of the best for sharing and printing photos on the web:

flickr is made for snap happy photographers. From the simple uploading interface to the Organizr tool, the folks at flickr designed the site for photo sharing. You can easily exhibit all of your photos to the public or control who sees them with convenient privacy settings. You can also track how many people have viewed your pictures. But one of the best aspects of flickr is the community. Like other social networks, flickr allows you to connect to your friends and see their photostreams and see their new pictures whenever they upload them. It also allows friends and visitors to leave comments (and even highlight portions of the picture to leave mouse-over callouts on any photo!). Spend hours looking through tags of photos to find anything and everything a person could take a picture of. Flickr makes it easy for bloggers to add their pictures to their blog (except for Xanga users). It unlike all the photo printing sites, flickr even allows people to download your files which makes it a great tool for archiving files. On top of that, it allows your friends and anyone else to download different sizes of your picture files, including the high-resolution originals! Sharing photos has never been easier since flickr came along. Now you can get prints of your pictures! If you are connected to friends you can also print out their photos as well. There are also a few printing services like Zazzle that you can use.

Shutterfly was one of the original online photo services along with Snapfish and Ofoto. It has continued to stay independent unlike its competitors (Snapfish was owned by District Photo and now is owned by HP; Ofoto was bought by Kodak). Shutterfly has the most user friendly interface of all the online photo printing services and makes organizing and editing photos simple and easy. The desktop uploading tool is a bit buggy, but usually can get the job done. Shutterfly prints come out with relatively accurate colors and pretty good quality. Although the consensus is that Ofoto has better quality prints, comparing them side by side, Shutterfly is comparable. The slideshow feature loads quickly but at lower resolution than the Kodak EasyShare Gallery (Ofoto) does. Shutterfly is a great service for sharing photos online. For new members you get 15 free 4×6 prints.

Ofoto was bought by Kodak which has changed the name to the Kodak EasyShare Gallery. Ofoto quickly became the leading online photo service with high-quality prints and competitive pricing. The Ofoto interface is less intuitive than the Shutterfly interface. Editing and organizing photos is much more complicated on Ofoto. You also have to register and log in to see other peoples photos which can sometimes be a pain. But once you login, the updated slideshow presentation loads quickly (photos are now pre-loaded in the background) and they are at higher resolution than they used to be. But Ofoto’s strength is in the processing. Backed by Kodak, Ofoto has continued to perfect the process of printing digital photos. This is a very compelling reason for DSLR owners who want to print large photos with accurate colors and sharpness to use the Ofoto service. 4×6 prints run for about $0.25 each.

Snapfish started off as an online film processing solution. It was bought by District Photo and recently sold to Hewlett Packard. It has built a similar offering to Shutterfly and Ofoto, but the prints are not quite as good as the big two online printing services. They have tried to differentiate themselves with mobile camera phone photo printing, a service that the others have not quite fully adopted yet. For new Snapfish members you receive 20 free prints. For existing memberships Snapfish pricing is extremely competitive and now offers 4×6 prints for only $0.12 each.

Other Services

Photo Sharing/Hosting:

• PBase
• Zoto
• Smugmug
• Photobucket
• Fotki
• Webshots
• ImageEvent.com

Photo Printing/Publishing:

• PhotoWorks
• Picaboo
• Winkflash.com

Desktop Photo Slideshows:

• Slide
• FilmLoop
• Tubeshow

Photo Licensing and Selling:

• Fotolia
• Digital Railroad

Online Storage:

• 25 Free Gigs at MediaMax

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What is eSnips?
eSnips is a social content-sharing site, where you can publish and share any media type. You have practically unlimited flexibility in choosing what you want to share, and with whom, in 5GB of free space.

eSnips is the one place where you can share anything you want, about any topic: your thoughts, your photos, your music, your videos, your flash files, stuff you find on the web, and many other media types. Once you create different folders for each of your passions and interests, you decide what files to put in each folder, and you control who is allowed to view each folder – just you, a select group, or the world.

Browse around a bit, with eSnips you can discover new content and people who share your interests.

How is eSnips different from other online social/sharing sites?

eSnips is unique in several ways:

• eSnips is the one place on the Web for any and all digital content.
• eSnips offers one account that allows you to share anything with anyone - giving you options on who and how you want to share with. You can create as many folders as you like, each for a different topic. Then you can decide what audience can view each folder. No other content-sharing site allows you such flexibility in publishing your media.
• eSnips creates the community around you and your content - by bringing like minded people who share your interests to you.

Who is eSnips for?
eSnips is for anyone who has anything they want to share with others - like home movies they want to share with family members or a hobby they want to share with others with the same interests. eSnips creates a community around your passions by making it easy to find others and for others to find you.

We’ve made eSnips easy to use so that everyone will be able to use it. Since eSnips is based on your content, not just your thoughts, you don’t have to update your folders every day.

Whatever you are interested in, you will find others who share your passion on eSnips.

Here are a few examples of graphic widgets you can create with your eSnips account.

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There are thousands of tutorials on the web on how to create a Web 2.0 styled logo. I came across one that has a small but very useful bonus. At Hongkiat’s blog there is an excellent tutorial on how to create the infamous Web 2.0 logos and a styles preset download for Photoshop with several styles to create the logos. In the tutorial you can learn how to create these logos.

Head on over to Honkkiat’s blog to download the styles preset and take the tutorial. You will soon be able to create your very own Web 2.0 logo.

If you need inspiration when creating your Web 2.0 logo then check out Go2Web20.net where you can find hundreds of Web 2.0 logos.

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PhotoPresets for Photoshop Lightroom by Jack Davis

Many photographers are experiencing the power and flexibility of the recently released Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, a breakthrough image management and processing tool designed for photographers. To expand the creative possibilities OnOneSoftware are pleased to offer PhotoPresets with One-Click Wow! a dynamite collection of development presets created by renowned Photoshop educator, author and photographer Jack Davis. And the best part is the price, free.

Designed to work the way you work, the PhotoPresets with One-Click WOW! tackle only one development parameter allowing you to optimize your image at each step to create the look you really want without sacrificing any quality. Rather than bloated presets that control all the variables at once and make adjustments that you may not like and you have to hunt down to fix. You start with adjusting your images color and tone and then can add effects like black and white conversions, tinting, split-toning and vignetting. With XX presets in X categories the number of combinations is astounding. Here are some examples of what you can do with PhotoPresets with One-Click WOW!

System Requirements

Windows

• Windows XP with SP2 or later
• 1 GHz processor or faster
• 1GB of RAM or more
• 2MB of disk space
• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0

Macintosh

• Mac OS X 10.4 or later
• 1 GHz processor or faster
• 1GB of RAM or more
• 2MB of disk space
• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0

Download the presets here.

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Here are ten great tips to get you started in Lightroom

T Is for Toolbar
Pressing the letter T on your keyboard hides the toolbar that appears at the bottom of the Preview area, and pressing T again makes it visible. However, if you’d like to hide it temporarily (which is handy for taking a quick, uncluttered look at your photo), then press-and-hold T and the toolbar only hides as long as you have the letter T held down.

Rate Photos Quickly
When applying star ratings to photos in the Library module, if you hold down the Shift key while applying your rating, it will automatically move you to the next photo. So, if you press Shift-4, rather than just 4, it assigns a 4-star rating to the current photo and then immediately brings up the next photo.

Control Your Panels
Pressing the Tab key hides all the side panels in Lightroom, so your photo(s) are displayed larger onscreen. If you move your cursor over a side triangle where a Panels area used to be, it temporarily pops back out. When you move away from a panel, it automatically hides. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can configure each Panels area individually, as well as the filmstrip along the bottom and the module picker up top. If you want to turn this “auto-popping” off, you can switch to Manual mode, so when you want a Panels area open or closed, you click the triangle next to it. You can also choose Auto Hide, where you manually open that Panels area, but when you move away from it, the panels automatically hide. To access these options, Control-click (PC: Right-click) on one of those triangles and choose from the pop-up list.

Bigger Text
If the text displayed in the panels seems a little too small for your tastes (and you’re getting tired of squinting), you can change the font size by going to Lightroom (PC: Edit)>Preferences and clicking the Interface tab. Go to Panel Font Size, choose Large, then restart Lightroom, and your panel font size will be significantly larger.

Slide to the Default
To reset any slider back to its default setting, you can double-click directly on the slider knob, but I think it’s easier to double-click directly on the slider’s name instead—it’s a bigger target and easier to hit than that little slider knob.

Going Solo
If you want to see only the panel you’re working on and hide the rest, then Control-click (PC: Right-click) on the panel’s titlebar, and choose Solo Mode from the pop-up menu that appears. Now when you open a panel, all the other panels in that Panels area will automatically hide. (You can tell when your panels are in Solo Mode because the disclosure triangles change from a solid fill to tiny gray dots.) You can also turn Solo Mode on and off by Option-clicking (PC: Alt-clicking) on a panel’s name. Note: You can turn this feature on/off for each Panels area.

Remove Clutter
If you don’t use a particular panel, then there’s no reason to have it cluttering up your Panels area, right? So, just Control-click (PC: Right-click) on any panel’s titlebar, and from the pop-up list that appears, choose any panel you want to hide.

Full-Screen Photos
Want to see the photo you’re working on as large as possible? Then press Shift-Command-F (PC: Shift-Ctrl-F). To return to the regular view, press that same shortcut again.

More Than a Badge
You know those tiny icons that appear in the bottom-right corner of your photo in the Library Grid view (Adobe calls those “Badges”)? They let you quickly see what has been applied to the photo (e.g., the Pencil badge tells you that a keyword has been applied to the photo, and the +/– badge tells you that the photo has been edited in Lightroom, etc.). Double-click on any one of those badges, and it will take you directly to the panel where that adjustment was added. For example, if you double-click on the Pencil badge, it opens the Keyword panel and highlights the keyword field. Pretty slick.

Selective Histogram
The Histogram panel gives you the histogram for the entire photo. But, if you want a histogram reading on, say, the face of your subject to make sure the flesh tones have detail, go to the Develop module, click the Crop Overlay button, and drag in the corners to where it’s around just the face. Now the histogram shows you the reading from just what appears inside the crop border. When you’re done, press the Clear button in the toolbar to remove the crop border.

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