Another thunderstorm hit, this time at night. Lightning strikes were occurring every few seconds and some of them were producing visible forked lightning in the sky. I was hoping that the storm would continue long enough to capture a few hundred images to produce a time-lapse video. However, with my Canon 28-90mm F4-5.6 zoom lens attached to the camera and with the aperture set to F4, due to the low light; each exposure required 30 seconds – I set the timer on the EOS Utility to take an exposure every 35 seconds. This worked for the purpose of taking pictures of lightning; I captured the images that you see below. However, at 35 second intervals the thunderstorm was over before I had enough frames for even 5 seconds of video. What I’ve learned from this is that I need to use a faster lens if I’m to capture time-lapse in low light (ie. at night).
My Canon 50mm F1.8 Mk II probably would have been ideal for this, but I seem to have lost it! I think it must have fallen out of the lens bag while I was running to get a new angle on sunrise before the sun came above the horizon. That’ll teach me to run without doing up the zip on the bag! This will actually be the second Canon 50mm f/1.8 Mk II that I’ve lost, the first one was left in the Kwik-fit waiting room with my EOS 400D – not good! Canon’s 50mm prime is definitely a lens that I’ll buy again but what I really want is for Canon to produce a lens that will give me 50mm perspective on the APS-C sized sensor in my EOS 40D – in other words I want a low cost, high quality 30mm high-speed prime – identical in every way to the 50mm f/1.8 Mk II, except 30mm. Where is it Canon? Sigma do a 30mm prime for a Canon mount, but it’s not as cheap as Canon’s 50mm prime. I got my 50mm f/1.8 Mk II from Amazon for £62 – and it produced beautiful crisp pictures with excellent contrast and saturation. Why can’t I get a 30mm lens for £62?
It’s only once you start getting serious about landscape photography that you start to realise how limiting the 1.6x multiplier on an APS-C sized sensor really is. It’s great if you’re using a telephoto because you effectively get a longer focal length for free. That’s fine, except that the flipside is that it becomes very expensive to get a decent wide angle. Right now I’m more bothered about getting a really wide angle and I’m going to have to shell out a load of cash for something like a Canon 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM – I think that may be my next lens purchase but it won’t come cheap!
Anyway, enough of me rambling about lenses, here’s those lightning photos:
Brighton lit up by lightning
Sky lit up
Lightning strikes the ground
Lightning in clouds
