By midday the weather looked promising
– big cumulonimbus clouds against deep blue - my kind of sky. I had
some things to finish up. Finally, late afternoon, I headed out to
see what I could see. By the time I got to where I had a clear
horizon, the sky had smeared – a cloudy sky with a few blue
patches, Dutchman's trousers I used to call it. No towering majesties, but there was still interest. The sun,
beginning to lower itself into the west, created a low faint rainbow in
the east. Nothing spectacular, but worth a smile. The clouds
gradually drifted away to hazy banks in the distance. As the sun got
lower and lower, I hoped it would do some sky painting, but the
distant clouds put it slowly to sleep. I could see rain showers and then some lightning, far away to the north. It would be nice to
get some lightning shots, but it was still too light to get the
longer exposure times needed. Gradually the storms moved off
away behind me, as I hoped some sky scenery would develop for me in the south, where my camera was facing.
The clouds grew and changed and faded with the speed of a minute
hand. Then, as twilight approached, a flash of lightning. I set the
ISO to 50 and stopped the aperture down to f16. A third of a second
– maybe I'd get lucky. There were a couple of spectacular flashes
just as I was about to release the shutter or immediately after it
closed. As the sky darkened and my exposure time slowed to several
seconds, the lightning moved away and became reflections of
flashes inside clouds, and I hadn't caught anything. The thunder was
soft distant rumblings.
Then, lightning bolts off to my left!
The camera had reached its maximum automatic exposure time of 30
seconds and was beginning to increase the ISO. I still hadn't
managed to catch a lighting bolt, missing by mere fractions of a second on
several occasions. The lightning now started flashing about in the
clouds beyond the lighthouse. I switched to bulb, set the aperture
to f11 and the ISO to my default of 200. The camera was beginning to
have trouble focusing on the darkening low-contrast clouds, so I set one of the AF points on the
lighthouse a couple of miles across San Carlos Bay. When the lantern blinked the
camera would focus and I could trip the shutter. I was guessing at
the exposure times, starting at 60 seconds and gradually lengthening
as it grew darker. The lightning started showing off again, occasionally being quite spectacular, and I
began to catch a few. As it got darker, my exposure times grew
longer, and by the time the exposure reached four minutes, I could
catch a lighting bolt almost every time. I'd close the shutter after
a good one, and then try to catch the next one. After a little while
the storms moved away. The show was over.
In about an hour, I
exposed perhaps sixty frames and caught lightning bolts 16 times,
mostly in the later, longer exposures. I didn't get the cumulonimbus
skyscape I went after. Isn't that always the way? But I'm not
disappointed at all.
Caroline's background was tricky, too. She needed pink zebra stripes. I worked hard to retain her reflection on the studio floor so it makes it appear that she is sitting on the pattern instead of floating in front of it. The striped pattern is actually a double mirroring. Placing the horizontal mirror line at the axis of her legs gives the serendipitous illusion that the pattern bends up behind her. 
