North Atlantic Skyline - - Photographs from the west of Ireland (Galway, Mayo, Clare, Limerick, Roscommon and even Leitrim)

Summer Thunder

Petrol tanks, a huge pile of coal, and lightning bolts - what could possible go wrong ? Lightning over Galway Bay, photographed from the Docks tonight.

Camera = Canon 5D , lens= Canon 24-105mm@24mm, ISO=100,Aperture=f11,speed=30 sec.

Did anyone else in Galway get a picture of the lightning over the bay this evening ? I had been down on Silver Strand earlier when I heard the thunder rumbling across the bay. I drove back to the Promenade at Salthill and decided to have a look around. It was a beautiful warm, balmy evening and there were loads of people strolling along the seafront. Suddenly, the sky was lit up by streaks of lightning crackling across the sky over the Burren hills across the Bay.

I quickly set up my camera and tripod (or portable lightning conductor, to give it it's full title). Now, if you see a flash of lightning, it's already too late to take a snap. So I pointed the camera in the general area of sky where the lightning occurred, counted the period between flashes, and set off a number of long exposures, in the hope that lightning would appear during the shot. I had even picked a nice colourful foreground (see picture below) - all I need was a bolt from the blue.

It didn't take long. A number of flashes happened during the exposures. But there was a problem - they weren't bright enough to show up in the photographs (except very faintly in two of them) . I took dozens of shots, in the hope that a huge flash would light up the sky. And as time went on, people stopped to ask if I'd got any nice shots, to which I had to mumble,"Err , not yet". There were two huge flashes - I missed the first one because it occurred between shots (after a long exposure, the camera takes a few seconds to write the image to disk) and I missed the second one (and the best) because, five seconds before, my mother rang me on my mobile. OK, I missed both of them.

Thoroughly depressed with the lack of success, I gave up and went home. As I got into the apartment, there was a huge rumble of thunder so I decided to set up both my cameras on the balcony. I set them off on alternating 30 second exposures, so that there was always one of them in mid-exposure. The shot above was the best of it - the field of view wasn't great because of the floodlights and street lamps, but I was too lazy to drive back to Salthill again (and the lightning show only lasted for another 15 minutes after I got home.

I was very tempted to just Photoshop a few lightning bolts into this picture - Salthill Promenade this evening, as thunder rumbles across the bay.

Camera = Canon 5D , lens= Canon 24-105mm@24mm, ISO=400,Aperture=f11,speed=30 sec.

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Posted by Monasette at May 12, 2006 12:01 AM