written by: Keith Taylor
I have to explain, I’m having the time if my life at the moment.
Outside of the windows of my little studio apartment in downtown Bangkok, home base for an additional quarter or so, hawaiian isle storm is raging. The streets are flooding with water, bolts of lightning shoot from your sky every couple of seconds and peals of thunder crackle from your air almost constantly.
Storms are nothing new – I’ve spent almost all the this past year in Thailand, including specific times of the season they are a daily occurrence – but what really excites me is the fact I recently learned how to get photos from the lightning.
I’d always assumed not wearing running shoes required a lot of special equipment so as to catch the actual precise moment on the lightning bolt. I knew that human reflexes are not near sharp enough to catch a bolt manually, and in many cases once they were your camera isn’t fast enough taking a go in time. Whatever i learned, though, is usually that lightning photography can be carried out that has a ‘fire-and-forget’ simplicity. All you need to do is the actual camera is stable, set the shutter speed to bulb exposure and wait for lightning to show up in frame.
Naturally, this is most effective through the night when there are few options for light to overexpose the shot, but this evening I’ve taken some pretty amazing photos in the Bangkok skyline being attacked via the wrath from the sky.
There’s two problems faced because of the lightning photographer. The foremost is that long exposures warm up the sensor something awful, therefore the longer the exposure the grainier the shot. Ideally you’d like an exposure no more than the small amount of seconds.
The more expensive problem, though, stems from my Canon T2i battery. The T2i can perform around 400 shots coming from a full battery, however when you’re shooting long exposures that figure plummets. When shooting long exposures you may burn using a battery inside of 1 hour, and if you’ve ever tried lightning photography you know you won’t ever have to stop up until the last bolt.
The solution, not surprisingly, can be to plan your power usage before even thinking about. I take advantage of battery power grip when I’m shooting lightning, allowing me to load an additional Canon T2i battery near the first. This bumps up my shooting the perfect time to a period of time, nevertheless it’s still almost enough.
To convey myself the moment I really need, the top option would be to cycle through three batteries. For shooting considering the camera grip attached I’ll expect to have an extra battery charging indoors. As i get a battery warning I’ll yell inside for my aunt to produce from the fully charged Canon T2i battery. When that fails, I’ll rush towards grab it myself (avoiding my wife’s yelling) and replace one of many batteries into the charger.
It’s not at all perfect, as well as most suitable option would be to install another power source, in case simply set you back buy additional equipment this method means that you can target numerous hours prior to a power drain finally catches choice!
If you find yourself in need of a Canon T2i Battery this one is available on Amazon.com and I highly recommend it.

