Lightning

The weather report last night said that today would be 36 degrees celcius with strong winds.  The fire danger is extreme.

So at 3am this morning I was awoken by thunder.  Initially my thoughts were yay, I love thunder and lightning, yay I'm on holidays so I can get up and watch.  Once outside I thought of the weather report and then thought, oh bugger, the lightning is a mix of sheet and fork lightning.  Better not start any fires 'cause there is very little rain coming with all of this. 

At 3am I decided to try and take photos.  Really wish I knew the proper technique for this but considering I don't know it, I figure I did pretty damn good.  :)

This is my first shot, and out of about 600 photos (I can take 40 shots a second) the majority of them turned out like this:

I personally thought I did a brilliant job.  The camera I am using is my mothers Lumix FZ100.  I find it is quicker and easier to use for some things than my more professional one. Not one for fussing around too much, I tried the camera on it's Intelligent Auto setting.  This worked great for the lunar eclipse a few weeks back.  Hmmm better put those photos on here as well.  That will be a post in itself.

These next two shots are taking using the IA setting

I came inside to check on the quality as I find the bigger computer screen shows more blur than the small camera screen.  I decided the IA was showing the full detail so I changed the setting to night scene but kept it on auto.  If you look hard enough in some of the photos, you can see the reflection of the lightning on the lense.

Not sure what is with the darker line on this photo.  It appeared on a few, so I can only guess that it has something to do with the 40 shots per second.  I do think I framed this nicely though.  :)

After getting a stiff neck I finally decided to just take photos willy nilly, (is that still said now days) and I got this shot.  Nearlly missed it altogether but happy with what I got.

In this one you can see the end flicker of sheet lightning.

Earlier I said there was barely any rain, well it is coming down hard now.  It is 5am, and the thunder and lightning have been constant.  Love this weather.

Going back to bed now, though I am not sure if I will go back to sleep.