Lightning Photos, Video From Thu, Fri

I finally got around to extracting some still images and video of the lightning that I took on Thursday and Friday evening. I got some decent shots. The three best ones are shown below:

The first photo was taken from my back porch after I took the second photo from my front porch and moved the camera on May 31st. These photos were being taken as the microburst was mowing down power poles on Park Avenue (see radar images & movies in that blog entry).* The third photo was taken from my back porch facing the opposite direction on June 1st.

Unfortunately I didn't save the AccuWeather.com LightningPlus map, or I could have probably pinpointed the strikes. The first one is unusually close, probably only a couple miles away. Here are thumbnails; click on them to see all the photos. The nighttime photos were taken later on May 31st when I went to try and get a look at the Park Avenue damage but more storms were incoming. There are also a couple examples of "False" or "Ghost" lightning (which we discussed a couple of weeks ago).

There is a video below of all the strikes, but it's not great; the original is available for download here and you can view all the still frames of the strikes, which are much higher quality.

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How did I get these shots? It might seem easy but this involved eyeballing about an hour of Quicktime footage and some painful work with Quicktime Pro to put the movie together. My Kodak Z650 camera takes 640x480 movies and you can copy the still frames out. The resolution's not great but it beats trying to leave the shutter open for 8 seconds (which is the max it will allow). The nighttime ones had bad JPEG compression so I ran a Photoshop sandstone filter on them to smooth them out. Another disadvantage is missing parts of the strikes, because the frame rate is only 11 FPS.

*Below is raw video of me observing the storm when Henry (PREMIUM | PRO) called to say that the power was blinking and the phones were out. No lightning was captured in this film but you can hear us talking. Little did we know at the time the action we were missing out on, out at Park Avenue.

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