{"id":882,"date":"2003-07-19T21:19:56","date_gmt":"2003-07-19T21:19:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/?p=882"},"modified":"2020-08-20T21:20:52","modified_gmt":"2020-08-20T21:20:52","slug":"maximum-zeusage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/2003\/07\/19\/maximum-zeusage\/","title":{"rendered":"Maximum Zeusage"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sometimes Nature has a way of, well, jolting you when you get too cocky. Yesterday afternoon I was sitting in our living room testing out the wireless network coverage in the house, watching a music DVD, and generally trying to do some work whilst reading my camera’s user manual. I found a web site called www.digi-darkroom.com<\/a> with a forum for owners of my model camera, a Fuji Finepix S602z. One of the posts there was a question on how to photograph lightning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since no-one had pointed out that – at least at night – you can get good results with a tripod and a 15-second exposure, I did so, and posted a photo I took a couple of years back when we had that cool storm. It didn’t matter that the camera I used at the time was the Kodak DC265.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Since then, by the way, I have taken\u00a0better shots of lighting. Still nothing to boast about, though.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, I got some good comments about the picture and the (obvious) technique.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s the thing: Last night we had a terrific lightning storm. Lisa and I had actually gone to bed, but the flicker and boom piqued my interest and I had to go outside and enjoy the show, standing in our driveway in my t-shirt and boxers in the warm and unusually humid air. I love thunderstorms. Every now and then water drops would spatter down, and hit the hot concrete, steaming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The lightning would flicker from cloud to cloud, darting around the valley, and then suddenly this huge potential build-up would finally discharge from the sky to the ground in an electric-blue thread of energy, repeating this pattern over and over again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It reminded me a lot of the old tilting bucket fountain in Cuba Street, Wellington.  Only with more ozone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, the point of my story is that I went in to get my camera to see if I could get some of this on film (well, on memory chip) but I didn’t know how to set up a 15 second timed exposure on this newfangled contraption. See, when I try to do three things at once (see first paragraph) I end up not really doing any of them. I still need to read the manual…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The storm was over at about midnight, but at 3:45 am we were woken up with an almighty clap of thunder over our heads. “Close enough for you?” said Lisa. I pretended to be asleep.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes Nature has a way of, well, jolting you when you get too cocky. Yesterday afternoon I was sitting in our living room testing out the wireless network coverage in the house, watching a music DVD, and generally trying to do some work whilst reading my camera’s user manual. I found a web site called www.digi-darkroom.com with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diary","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}