Smartphone Camera Apps

[David Draun]

Hey, I think we all have been there. Its not a chase day per se, but its a hot summer evening with light unidirectional speed shear and extreme instability from daytime heating. Heavy rain producing thunderstorms are slowly crawling toward your area and its a lightning discotheque outside. You know those nights. It's clear all around except for the storms. Bolts are jumping into the air and positive CGs are jumping miles out of the storms. You're out running errands and are caught without your awesome DSLR camera with a lightning trigger that you use when chasing. But you do have an awesome smartphone that takes decent pictures. Lightning photography requires really quick reflexes or long exposure time among other things. Are there any apps out there for Android that will do long term exposure? Anyone know?

Last year I used an app called Lightning Camera for those types of nights, but it does a rapid fire capture of low quality and then you can pick the best frame. It's cool, but I would love better resolution.

 

[David Draun]

I suppose Lightning Camera does not take terrible pictures. Here are some of my coolest captures from last year.

 

[AmandaBurns]

What os are you using, apple? Android?

 

[David Draun]

Android.

 

[Jake Orosi]

I have a suggestion that some might want to consider.

This is the "okay-ish" shot that my forum avatar came from. I took it with an iPod Touch, which had a lousy 2.x MP camera on the back. But I didn't use an app - I took a few-minutes-long video of the lightning, let the phone's utility process the raw video into an HD clip, and then stepped through the video frame-by-frame when I saw a good-looking bolt. When I found a good frame I just screenshot it. I suppose I could've post-processed it if I wanted to using whatever app of my choice as well.

The larger photo is somewhat poor quality owing to the low-end camera; but even my low-end Lumia smartphone's camera has double the MPs that old iPod did. With a newer camera you should be able to score some decent grabs with this method if you can't find an acceptable lightning-trigger app for your phone.

 

[David Draun]

I'd rather have long exposure to capture multiple bolts like my DSLR can.