Two nights ago a thunderstorm rolled through Val Marie. This is the view from my front porch, looking across the street.
For this shot I used my oldest lens, the manual focus NIkon 24mm f/2.8 that I bought in 1981. The old lens has to be manually stopped down - to f/11 in this case - and the shutter was held open on "Bulb". As soon as these lightning forks lit up the sky, I ended the exposure.
In post processing, I left the white balance as is. For lightning at night it often shifts too far toward magenta, but in this case it didn't. I cloned out one telephone wire and a small section of a porch pillar that encroached at the extreme upper right, curving into the frame due to the upward tilt of my lens. Camera was on a tripod and I used a cable release with mirror lockup to ensure no unintentional movement or vibration. Street lights had rendered the house too yellow for my liking, so I selected it and changed the colour balance of its facing wall, adding blue and green to tone down the tungsten look, while not altering the colour elsewhere in the frame. I also used the burn tool - carefully - on the brightest part of the image, where the lightning emerges from the clouds.
Photographed in Val Marie, Saskatchewan. Don't use this image on websites, blogs, or other media without explicit permission © 2017 James R. Page - all rights reserved.
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