March 1, 2021 - By Johan Orrego

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It was 6:30 pm on a Saturday night and I heard the thunders rumbling across the sky. It had been only 3 months since I got a second-hand DSLR and I was in my first college semester. I wanted so badly to get a picture of a night sky with a lightning that without a second thought I got my hands on it. I set up my tripod hoping to capture something more than pitch black.

There was still a little bit of light, so I started shooting my pictures with a low ISO, but I knew eventually I would need a higher ISO and I wanted my aperture to get the lowest possible value the lens allowed me. I tested with 20 or 40 pictures and I couldn’t get anything. It’s actually very hard to know when to shoot when you are just guessing the place where the lighting will show up, and of course I was being pretentious thinking I could capture something as fast as the speed of light. Silly me. And Yet I kept trying. The lighting where happening at a different time. I couldn’t seem to nail any of the pictures. I tried continuous shooting but then again, nothing. So, while I started to feel a little frustrated I came up with a different approach.

I framed a wide shot where most of the lighting were happening and set my settings with a 26 mm lens to the following values: ISO > 3200, f/5.6, shutter speed > 0.6 sec, focus to infinite, and finally I got the camera on intervalometer mode. I was going to do pictures every 2 seconds. “Why would you want to take pictures every 2 seconds?” You may ask. My thinking behind that was that the chances of getting at least one picture with a lightning on it were higher if I had 400 pictures. It was 400 times the chances that it was going to be if I just gave up and went to bed frustrated after the first 40 failed attempts.

I didn’t have to wait long to realize that was the right approach. It happens that you get a rush of adrenaline when you hear the camera is shooting and at the same time the sky is getting lit by a lightning. I wanted to check right away, but I couldn’t stop my camera because it could happen that by interrupting the intervals while checking the previous pictures a better chance of lighting could happen. I was going to be there for at least 15 minutes. Well, 13.33 minutes to be exact, but it was getting cold and soon it would start the heavy windy rain making it just too hard to see anything or keeping the camera dry.

I’m making a parenthesis here, but I think it’s worth it, so stay with me. When I’m taking pictures of such beautiful natural phenomenon the result becomes secondary, of course you want the picture, of course that would make it even better as this story happened to you and how you got the picture becomes as important as the result, but what I mean is, moments like this make me feel privileged and in awe. Having the chance to be an spectator of such remarkable nature is humbling…

And I’m back. I ended up with 1400+ photos and the sad part of the story that is when I was around 700 I started to run out of space and didn’t have an additional Compact Flash Memory Card handy, so I stopped taking raw images and just did JPGs. I know. I know. This is horrible and you will probably stop reading in this very moment, but I thought the alternative which was not taking more pictures at all was a much more higher price than downgrade the quality and have a little more available space. The way I see it, it’s better to have a JPG than not having anything at all.

When the rain stroke very violently I couldn’t keep going and the cold was making my hands numb. I went inside, I grabbed a towel, dried my hair, changed my clothes and surfed through the pictures in the tiny view finder of the camera and I was thrilled. Some of them looked actually promising. I let the pictures transferring to the hard drive and when it finished I got a very unpleasant surprise. In less than an hour I went from the highest point I-have-a-career-as-a-nature photographer to rock-bottom-everybody-is-gonna-hate-this. Back then I didn’t know stuck, dead or hot pixels were a thing.

All over my pictures there were these tiny green, red and blue dots scattered through the image. I knew the camera I was using wasn’t brand new but I didn’t know it was in that bad of a shape. I went online and ask Google about this and after doing some reading I learned that the worst of these three kinds are the dead pixels. Basically, dead pixels are pixels that are long gone, and nothing in the world, not even Shenron with the Dragon Balls can bring them back to life. They look like tiny black dots in your pictures, but luckily that wasn’t my case. My case was hot pixels, this is something that happens when you are taking long exposure pictures and the camera sensor gets hot. The camera says: “Hey dude, it’s getting hot in here and some of my pixels are feeling dizzy and changing colors. We should take a break”. Of course I didn’t know any better and my camera went on for another thousand pictures more. After watching the results, I had to reminded myself that thing I wrote before: “The result becomes secondary”, because apparently all I had was a good memory and a pair of cold blue hands.

I was able to salvage one of those picture and I posted on my Flickr account back then. It was a jpg so I didn’t even edited. There’s not a lot of room to edit a jpg anyway. I forgot about those pictures but they kept safe in my hard drive for years. Quick tip: Always keep your pictures. They will be reference points of how good you get with time and practice.

Cut to 2021. I recently quit my job. I needed more time to explore and get back to photography and I cannot tell you how much I’ve been enjoying my life lately just by focusing on things I love. This website/blog is born as a corollary of that idea and among those things I enjoy I started to put a time-lapse together with some shots I’ve been doing for years (coming soon). And this is how I found these lightning pictures. I thought that was a story I could share with everyone here. I hope you have enjoyed it..

Big take away of this story is that even if you don’t know how to do it you should dare yourself to go and do it. Worst case scenario you get a nice story. Best case scenario, the universe is in your favor and you end up getting a nice picture you can brag about to your family, friends, followers, or significant other. The gear shouldn’t stop you. I didn’t have the right gear back then and that didn’t hold me back from trying. Start with what you have at your disposal. If you really want that to happen something’s gotta give. The most important thing is to motivate yourself to go out and do it. The theory behind photography, composition, proper exposition, angles, etc., it’s something you can learn in a classroom (let’s call it zoomroom these days), but the practical part is something you can get just by trial and error. Don’t take my word for it. Go out and use that camera more.