I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, and finally sat down to tackle it. You have to admit, it definitely fits into the ‘Too cool’ category, and offers a great insight into the rising air masses that form thundercells.
We are revisiting the photos taken during my July trip to the Outer Banks with a sequence of 34 consecutive frames as an animation, creating a dynamic illustration of the storm cloud activity. And there are a couple of things that I want you to keep in mind. The clouds themselves were only lit by lightning, and for the most part could not be seen in person except in millisecond flashes – even the faint sky colors at the beginning of the animation, the last vestiges of twilight, were too dim to really define the clouds except in these long exposures. Also, the exposures were varied, within the 20-35 second range, so in most cases multiple lightning strikes were captured, the majority of them within the clouds. If you look very closely, you can see the motion of the stars, and even a cool effect: directly above the lighthouse, the stars seem to move almost directly downward, while over the storm they have more of a diagonal motion. This is a trait of the wide-angle (18mm) lens, which gives a hint of fisheye distortion; all of the stars are tracing portions of a circle, but the ones closest to the equator have the largest arc and thus seem to move almost straight. The same distortion makes the lighthouse lean into the frame a bit. I readily admit that I did not bother removing the digital sensor noise from the frames, those bright red and blue dots, because it would have taken hours to go through them all.
Now, a couple of pointers if you want to attempt this. First, try to pick your camera position right from the start and don’t change it, leaving it fixed firmly to a steady tripod. I took an initial dozen or so images and then re-aimed the camera slightly, making it necessary to shift those frames to line up with the others, a tedious process at best – you can see a little twitching where it wasn’t perfect. Second, making sure the camera is level helps a lot; mine wasn’t, and all of the images had to be tilted slightly to look like I knew what I was doing. It seems like a simple thing, but it isn’t – in the dark, there are no references to sight the frame edges with, and often it’s hard enough to even tell where in the frame the prominent elements (like a lighthouse) are falling. Having a small spirit level can help, as long as there is a nice even surface to use it on, but whatever method you use, at least try to have it so you don’t have to correct the alignment of every frame afterward.
The varying light on the lighthouse itself, and the fence and foreground, does not come from lightning bursts behind the camera, but from me firing off an external flash unit to give the lighthouse more definition than just a silhouette; it took a few tries to determine the angle that would work best. While the bright sparks down below the treeline, among the buildings, were from other visitors, mostly firing off their phone cameras and oblivious to the fact that their flashes were completely ineffectual at that range, as well as the light show they were missing by facing in entirely the wrong direction.
All of that stands alone quite well. But there’s an additional item of interest – maybe.
I meant to mention in that earlier post that something I’ve been wanting to capture is a little phenomenon usually called a red sprite, a dim discharge that occurs, on rare occasions, well above an active thundercell. The conditions have to be just right, and even then they’re wildly unpredictable. But while out alongside the lighthouse watching the electrical show, I got a glimpse of something that I thought might have actually been one; subsequent reviews of the frames above the clouds didn’t show anything at all, so I figured I’d just gotten a stray reflection from my glasses.
With a lead-in like that, you know something has to be coming – and the truth is, I can’t tell you exactly what. Because while putting together this gif (pronounced, “SKIP-ee,”) I found not one, but two curious and presently unexplained lights in the sky – just, not where I thought they should be to fit the bill. Both of them appear in the animation above, if you watch closely right near the lighthouse light itself. To the right here is a full-frame example of an original frame, to give an idea of how big the items appeared, and again, this was shot with a wide-angle lens, so things look even further away than they would to the naked eye. The point of interest is just above the light, to the left slightly – really quite small, especially at this display size. I wouldn’t leave it at that, however, so we’ll go in for a better look, this time at the full resolution of the original image.
Now you can see two prominent stars that have actually moved a bit in the 31-second exposure, while much of the other white points are likely sensor noise, but the key item is the dim orange smudge. This is, as you can see, nowhere near the top of the storm cloud, and given the distance of the storm itself (my guess was at least 30 kilometers away, probably much more,) this would also have been many kilometers above the tops of the clouds as well. The skeptic in me frowns, not finding this likely. And as I said, I was firing off the external flash unit during most of these exposures, so it remains possible that those flash bursts illuminated something in the sky, such as one of the hordes of mosquitoes that were attacking me with vigor.
Except… a single flash burst lasts only a few milliseconds, short enough to freeze a mosquito in place, not produce an indistinct blur like this. And while the mosquito (or even a night-hunting bird or bat) would have been well out of focus since I was set for infinity, in order to appear this big in the wide-angle frame, it also would have had to have been close – so close that the powerful flash burst should have blown it out very very brightly. For comparison, I refer you to this post, where I captured either a bat or a moth, or both, with a sequence of strobing flashes. Same flash unit, but because of the strobe effect, each burst was about 1/16th the strength of the full-power bursts used in the images seen here; the sides of the lighthouse, being much further away, received far less of the light and so appear quite dim. Bear in mind that I mostly aimed the flash up to concentrate the light towards the more-distant top of the lighthouse, trying to keep the lighting even, but look at the brightness of the fence in the cases where I aimed a little lower, realizing that the fence was hundreds of times more distant than a mosquito would have to be to appear that big in the frame, and yet I still wasn’t aimed directly at it. Also note that, in the strobe images from that other post, the shapes of the critters can still be discerned despite not being remotely in focus, while here we only have a threadlike appearance.
Now the other one, not all that far away in the frame (almost a direct line beneath it, in fact) several minutes later on:
I could almost believe this one was a bird or something, simply because it had a little more shape, but it doesn’t seem to fit. To be far enough that it wouldn’t get overexposed by the flash, it would have to be quite big, and then it would be getting into a decent focus distance; it should be either much brighter, or much sharper. Stray reflections from the lens are highly unlikely, since nothing very bright was shining anywhere near my position save for that lighthouse light, and while that’s bright enough to burn away the window frames and railing, it produces no effects in any of the other frames from that night. I could easily have seen any planes that might have come into the frame (which I did not,) but even if I missed one, the navigation strobes would have produced a dotted line in the 24-second exposure – I have examples of this from the later storm further south that same night.
So, did I capture a pair of sprites, or some other curious electrical phenomena that evening? I honestly don’t know – all I can say is a few things that they probably aren’t. For now they’re simply UFOs, or perhaps the more accurate but less understood appellation UAP, for unknown aerial phenomenon. But my curiosity is piqued, at least…
Let’s take another look at converting color images into monochrome. It’s not very often that I’m out with the intention of shooting images to be converted, and I never switch the camera over to monochrome mode; instead, during sorting or editing I’ll pick a handful of images that look like they might fit the bill and see what comes up with the conversion and a little tweaking. So in this case, we’ll use one of the shots taken at Driftwood Beach on Jekyll Island, seen at left. Monochrome images make use of contrast above all else, and this image was taken as the rising sun was transitioning from low-contrast light, diffused by the thicker atmosphere at the horizon, to the high-contrast light of bright sun in clear skies – we can see the sharpening contrast in the textures of the rough sand and the trees against the sky. I consider this a moderate level of contrast, not the best candidate for monochrome, but it has promise, especially in the variety of textures. So we’ll start with simply wiping out the color by converting the image to greyscale.
This is, I think, the entire image, showing how the dark water dominated the frame and dictated the exposure – since cameras are always set to render a mid-tone from the light reaching the exposure meter, anything dark will be brightened up, and the small white flower, too small to affect the rest of the frame, got bleached out. This is why a good photographer pays attention to the overall brightness of the frame and compensates accordingly (which is why the image on that other post looks so much better.) But for our purposes here, it’s a neat effect.
Swallowtails, or indeed most butterflies, don’t hold still on flowers, and don’t sit with their wings extended out flat, so the behavior was the immediate clue to begin looking for something else. And even with this, it took a specific angle to see the spider that I was 99% certain was there.
After about two months, seriously, with no rain except for what the hurricane drove inland, the trend broke last night – and naturally, I had to be out in it getting completely soaked; thankfully, this was not with camera equipment. This morning the rain returned, which is fine since we badly need the water, and this time it brought a nice little electrical storm. I have no lightning images this time around, mostly because it was daylight so the shutter cannot be locked open waiting for a strike to occur (well, it can, but the result will be a solid white picture,) but also because the storm was centered almost directly overhead, not only making it dangerous to be out someplace, it was pouring and this obscures everything except the very closest strikes. So the image seen here is from back in July, and was a casual effort during another close storm that did not bring any rain – again, it wasn’t prudent to do a proper session, so this was captured by bracing the camera against the front porch railing and simply holding the shutter open. Not too bad for that, really – could easily have been worse, especially with the opportunity for camera shake. I include it solely for visual accompaniment.
I’ve mentioned this before but will say it again: for sunrise and sunset shots, bracketing the exposure heavily is highly recommended, and by this I mean, taking several frames both over and under exposed from what the camera’s exposure meter is reading; 
I did manage to get a little more cooperation from the birds as the morning progressed, but not as many frames as I would have liked. When a bird is flapping, only certain wing positions (like this one) look good in the air, but timing the shot to catch the wings right there is next to impossible. Or at the very least, beyond my present abilities. So while I was firing off a lot of frames in the hopes of capturing more than a few with a photogenic angle, a lot fewer of them actually showed this than I thought they might. Most especially, don’t just hold the shutter down and let the frame-per-second rate of the camera do the work, since it’s entirely possible that it runs at the same rate as the flapping (or any other repetitive action) and you just get a sequence of the exact same pose. Be sure to pause, and if you have something flapping slower, try to time the shot precisely.
This image was taken only three minutes after the previous, so the conditions were not significantly lighter, but the framing was slightly different, producing a different exposure and rendition of the colors. The unfortunate part of this was the high contrast nature of the water texture, disguising the egret’s beak and almost completely hiding the one tern in the air in front of the egret (did you see it?) Naturally, I wasn’t aware of how this would look until I had unloaded the memory card at home, and by then I was a couple of days and five hundred kilometers too late to do anything about it. Notice, though, the illustration of a trait I’d mentioned in the previous podcast, the lack of any waves or breakers. This might have been the timing of the tides – you can see some faint waves from the visit 
This is a little bit different story. I’d initially shot this with a flash too, before the sun was up, but returned to it afterwards to take advantage of natural light, which did a vastly better job of rendering the scene. I have little doubt that the large crab who made that burrow did not just happen to find a fish head on its doorstep, but chose to make a new burrow where a lasting meal would be handy. At least until the seabirds made off with it – you can see the footprints of the first marauder in the fresh sand. Again, note the low light angle and the color cast, something that also worked well for the 
I think the little guy at right is a bird-voiced treefrog (Hyla avivoca,) but the variety of photos and markings that I’ve seen for that species make this tentative at best – it’s the closest I can come to pinning down an ID, anyway. It wasn’t calling when I spotted it, so that avenue of confirmation wasn’t open to me.
The specimen above had me suspect that I’d finally found one, until I carefully leaned in a little closer and could see the markings better; instead, this is a southern banded water snake (Nerodia fasciata,) and completely harmless, despite having the same habitat and behavior as a cottonmouth, save for the open-mouth threat display that the latter has at times (which is where it gets its name.) This is a small one, less than 40 cm long and perhaps slightly larger in diameter than my thumb, and while the headlamp confused it, it was starting to get suspicious after a minute or two and slowly slipped off into the undergrowth.
