Got home from work and the sky wasn't looking too friendly. Around 7pm we started to hear thunder in the distance and by 7:30 it was flashing pretty regularly and the sky was looking nasty.

That picture doesn't really tell the story very well since it's a 5 second exposure. This is a little better, just 10 minutes later, stopped way down. The sky was routinely lighting up but I was unable to really capture that.

5 minutes later it started to get really interesting.

A crop of the last one

Shortly thereafter my wife made it clear that I should get inside. Good thing she did since within minutes the sky opened up and it absolutely poured for 15 minutes or so.

Now if I could find a program that would let me stitch 20 or so jpgs into a short movie I'd upload a sequence of 10 second exposures that I took. I tried iMovie but it'll only let me go down to .3 seconds which isn't fast enough.

Great pictures Nate.

Great pictures Nate.

X2!

That's quite impressive, so what project was Team Arcy Sparky working on when this happened?

Very cool pictures, Nate.

Great pics! Is that from Bill? He is scheduled to hit us late Sunday......

Thanks for the compliments, it was pretty wild to see it live.

And no, I don't think that's Bill, just typical summer T-storms.

Nate, good stuff.. I think maybe to get a better stop motion sequence, copy each photo like 3-5 times and then use that for the video. Should give you more raw photos so the video sequence lasts longer. I'm not sure exactly how you were going about getting it to do stop-motion, but a quick Google turned up this. Maybe it'll help.

Awesome pics, Nate.

Now if I could find a program that would let me stitch 20 or so jpgs into a short movie I'd upload a sequence of 10 second exposures that I took. I tried iMovie but it'll only let me go down to .3 seconds which isn't fast enough.

Send them to Monsieur Samich, he can do it.

Chris -- I hope you don't mind me volunteering you, but I'd really like to see this. Mother Nature is my favorite artist, and lightning is one of my favorite of her works of art.

I found a similar tutorial for making the movie in iMovie and the bottom line is that :03 is too slow, I need something in the :01 range which is too low. And making the sequence last longer won't help since the frame rate will actually be slower by making identical frames out of the same image.

Thankfully a bit better googling by me turned up a freeware program called FramebyFrame which is pretty cool and easy to use. I've made the little 2 second movie and uploaded it to youtube. It's listed as "processing" so I'll check either later or tomorrow morning to see if it goes live.

edit - unfortunately Peter there's no lightning in the video, just the clouds rolling by over a period of about 10 minutes (compressed into 2 seconds).

Here, let's see if this works.

edit - it's only playing about half the sequence, but you get the idea of how fast stuff was going by.

^^

That's a pretty fantastic sequence! Too bad there wasn't time to get more images..

Works for me, looks like the opening sequence for a Top Gear review

^^

That's a pretty fantastic sequence! Too bad there wasn't time to get more images..

Well, I wasn't really planning on doing that at all. I was just messing around trying to catch the ever-illusive bolt of lightning, I have a thing for lightning. It wasn't until I was scrolling through the images on my laptop that I had the idea to string them together. It was just kind of lucky that I had that many shot at the same aperture/shutter so they fit.

Well, I wasn't really planning on doing that at all. I was just messing around trying to catch the ever-illusive bolt of lightning, I have a thing for lightning. It wasn't until I was scrolling through the images on my laptop that I had the idea to string them together. It was just kind of lucky that I had that many shot at the same aperture/shutter so they fit.

Now that you've done it, might keep an eye out for similar situations. I wonder if there's an easy way to set and forget the camera on tripod, so you wouldn't have to keep snapping the shutter.

Remastered these:

edit - unfortunately Peter there's no lightning in the video, just the clouds rolling by over a period of about 10 minutes (compressed into 2 seconds).

Well, lightning is just one of my favorites -- dark clouds rolling by is another.

Hawt.

Snorkled along the North Shore of Oahu

moar pitchers damit

Out at my parents' summer place. Jack awoke at the asscrack of dawn. So he and I drove into town to get bagels, coffee, and most important, chocolate milk. En route we saw roughly 30 wild turkeys, which are thriving out here since the red foxes mysteriously disappeared. Saw a bunch of deer, too. And some ducks. All good for a city kid. Now we are chilling, watching some Blue's Clues. I like having a son.

And I like coffee.

I like having a son.

Having children, and now grandchildren, is my greatest pleasure.

Breakfast of champions.

^Good lord those are adorable children. Jack had a black & white cookie for dinner last night.

I just partially fixed my parents' doorbell. It hadn't worked at all. Now it "dings," but it doesn't "dong." I still feel manly.

Did you pick up a third on vacation Stretch?

There's a promotion right now. Have two, get one free.