HUGE Positive Lightning Hit!

Originally posted by Greg Campbell
If you're close enough, shooting at a low f ratio, and using fast film or a high ISO setting, any lighting will look thermonuclear.
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That's right. No matter how close, a lightning bolt's width is about the size of a pencil. Those big strikes look so huge because the close proximity fried the film. Either the photographer's film was too fast (sensitive) to handle it, or the aperture was open too wide, or both. He/she might have been up at 400-800 iso. Around those speeds or faster, lightning appears almost cartoonish (I shot lightning on 800 night film once by accident, the lightning looked wide and hilarious.) Or maybe he was at 200 but just too darn close.

The other funky thing lightning does on film is display the main channel as looking larger/stronger than the branches. The main channel is almost always exaggerated in a photograph. Since the main channel drains electricity from points of opposing charge, it often takes multiple connections to get the job done. To our eyes, the main channel blinks multiple times. On a timed exposure, more light will hit that part of the film repeatedly. The exterior branches are exposed more delicately, because they only appear once. Example. http://www.lightninglady.com/photos/LLCaprice.jpg

How cool it would be if that rooftop and tree shot were exposed on slow film. We could really see what's going on...all the loops, beads, knots, interactions with the objects (and contact point!!)
 
Is the top photo (on the parent post of this thread) from a known chaser or photographer? I puzzled over why the photographer was taking a night picture of a building; most lightning shots are pointed up into the air in an area devoid of foliage, and buildings tend to be on the margins of such photos. Also the fronds on the rightmost palm tree suggest the light being up and slightly to the right. Some of the fronds facing the flash do not seem to be illuminated. It could be real but it sets off some bells for me.

Tim
 
Maybe he was just an inexperienced lightning photographer, and didn't know what he was doing, or he was just shooting a night scene and the lightning just so happened to occur when he was exposing.

Here is what it says about the guy who took this....read it carefully.

The above photo is courtesy of Kane Quinnell from Australia. It was almost his last. The above lightning stroke was almost certainly a "bolt from the blue" - a relatively rare positive lightning bolt that originates from the top of a distant storm cloud rather than from the negatively charged cloud base. These massive discharges can travel horizontally for 10 miles or more from the top of the main storm. Positive lightning bolts can pack peak currents of up to 340,000 amperes, and they last for tens, or even hundreds, of milliseconds. This is about ten times more current and ten times longer than regular (negative) lightning. As a result, positive lightning is extremely hot, and it does considerable damage to whatever it hits. If you happen to be unlucky enough to be the target of one of these monster bolts, you DO NOT survive. Here's Kane's description of what happened in his own words:

"I happened to be out in the back yard, watching a storm on Friday night (14/01/05) that appeared to be a few km away, (I live in Old Toongabbie, and the storm appeared to be in Pendle Hill, or Greystanes, Australia). I set the camera's settings so that the shutter remained open for four seconds, placed it on the back bumper of my car, hoping to get a few shots of lightning in the clouds a few km's away. There was no rain at all, and stars could be seen over the north 1/3 of the sky, so I did not feel in danger in any way. Boy was I mistaken... DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE ELECTRICAL STORMS - YOU COULD GET YOURSELF KILLED!

I clicked away a few times, and got nothing, and then clicked the button again, and within 0.5 seconds of me pressing the button, I had jumped at least 2 metres in the air, as I heard a tremendously loud crack of thunder, and see this amazingly bright beam of electricity right in front of me. I had then landed, grabbed the camera, and was inside the house within 2 seconds.

I did not realize just how lucky I was until I uploaded the picture to my computer, and saw a leader stroke that must have originated no more than 2 metres from where I was standing next to my car, under my carport. Had the main charge taken the leader near me, rather than the one it did, I would be dead.

When lightning strikes, it actually comes up from the ground first (called a leader stroke), this stroke makes the air within it conductive, and once it reaches the cloud, you have a complete circuit, and the bolt of lightning comes down from the cloud along the leader stroke. First leader to the cloud wins, luckily mine did not.

I estimate that the main bolt was approximately 1.5- 2 metres in diameter, and struck something in the yard behind the shed that is located at the back of the yard. That would have had an extremely large charge, and would have been extremely hot, hotter than the surface of the sun, at 5,500 degrees Celsius, it could have been around 30,000 degrees Celsius. Needless to say, I was buzzing for the rest of Friday night, due to the amount of adrenaline going through me 'cause of how close it had come."

Kane Quinnell was one very lucky bloke!
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I set the camera's settings so that the shutter remained open for four seconds, placed it on the back bumper of my car, hoping to get a few shots of lightning in the clouds a few km's away
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OK, this is where it gets even more puzzling. What's with the windowpane reflection in the image?

Tim
 
On second glance, it does seem a little odd that he doesn't know specifically what the lightning hit.

"...and struck something in the yard behind the shed that is located at the back of the yard.."

If it hit that close to his position, I'd think he would walk back there and check out what it hit. But perhaps lightning doesn't always leave a mark.
 
I would assume that a charge of that intensity would cause either stripped bark on the tree it appears to have hit...because to me, it appears to have hit a tree dead on. I believe this undeniably causes stripped bark or channel burn around the edge of the trunk where the charge hit.

Either way, I find it puzzling there is little evidence of the strike that was found by the photographer.

Tim raises some very valid red flags, and I am glad he is investigating this with careful scrutiny.
 
It hit that tree pretty dead center... There should have at least been burn marks or damage to the bark.

A bolt hit a tree less than 20 feet from our house and completely blew the bark off one side and split a good portion of the tree. The diameter of the tree is roughly 18 inches...

That photo does look odd because, as Tim V. noted, it looks like it was shot through a window - not on the trunk/hood of a vehicle.
 
If the tree was wet, the lightning may have flashed over the outside surface without damaging it. Most of the time lightning will travel under the bark and blow out a furrow down the length of the trunk, but it doesn't always happen.

Here is one on the ridge behind my house:
sp2000c.jpg


More tree damage shots at:
http://wvlightning.com/treedamage.shtml

Back to the shot - the reflection can be caused by a UV filter on the camera. The photo looks authentic IMO.
 
I happened to be out in the back yard, watching a storm on Friday night (14/01/05) that appeared to be a few km away, (I live in Old Toongabbie, and the storm appeared to be in Pendle Hill, or Greystanes, Australia). I set the camera's settings so that the shutter remained open for four seconds, placed it on the back bumper of my car, hoping to get a few shots of lightning in the clouds a few km's away. There was no rain at all, and stars could be seen over the north 1/3 of the sky, so I did not feel in danger in any way. Boy was I mistaken... DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE ELECTRICAL STORMS - YOU COULD GET YOURSELF KILLED!
Click to expand...

The facts and the story are quite inconsistent... That does make me suspicious.
 
My thoughts with a bolt this close would be either the shockwave of the thunder would blur a 4 second exposure by shaking the camera or the lightning itself screwing up the camera. Too clean for such a shot, I think, but that's just me.
 
I think the actual image is authentic - if the story is in question, I guess we could be looking at a photo that's been done like the Hollingshead supercell shots (found/taken from the original source and posted by a third party as his own).

Although, I haven't seen this photo anywhere else on the net or attributed to anyone other than the photographer credited here. The description is from a news article which could account for some editing of the story, even though it says it is in the photographer's own words.
 
The more I think about this, the more I think it could be authentic. The ghost image is probably not from a windowpane; I took a look and it appears to be 2 overlapping images of that house in the distance. This would be consistent with the photographer being startled and shaking the camera while holding the shutter open. The house probably illuminated while the camera was askew during another weaker lightning flash.

So... the only alarm bell in my mind are the palm fronds. But it's hard to tell.

Tim
 
Another thing that you can see is the chromatic abberation along the lightning branches in the top right part of the image. This is consistent with what a digital camera would capture.

However, those of you who have done still photos of close lighting know that you really have to stop down the aperture to keep something like this from completely whiting out the exposure. If you're shooting at F8 or wider for lighting 1-2 miles away or further and one hits that close, most cameras (digital and 35mm slide) are going to get a totally white image.

The exception is if you get a close strike that is actually *less* intense than normal that will have a lesser risk of overexposing, and a better chance of coming out correctly, even though it looks very intense on the image. It's almost better for photography to get a weaker close strike. I've caught several strikes up close at F8 dead-center in frame that were nothing but a white slide when they were developed.
 
Originally posted by Dan Robinson
However, those of you who have done still photos of close lighting know that you really have to stop down the aperture to keep something like this from completely whiting out the exposure. If you're shooting at F8 or wider for lighting 1-2 miles away or further and one hits that close, most cameras (digital and 35mm slide) are going to get a totally white image.
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This C-A shot I exposed at F4 or 5.6. Focal length was 50mm. However, the film was way slow, either 50 or 64iso slide. As well, this bolt was too close.

Usually, I have good luck with 4 and 5.6. It's so interesting how different photographers' settings vary. We all arrive differently; that's fun.

These are the types of exposures I'm after - tight so I can see knots, loops, beads and channels. F8 has proven to be too thin for me and underexposes lightning with my slow film speeds but if I was running at a faster ISO it would work. Maybe 100iso? I could almost see that. I really don't want the "nuclear" look. I try for accurate exposure, but hopefully not as close to the storm as I was in this case, shouldn't have been that close.
LLLivewire.jpg
 
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