Electrifying Evening
A massive lightning bolt snakes across the sky above the Sneffels Range, eventually striking the summit of Dallas Peak.
During this month of August the monsoon has been in active in southwest Colorado, with frequent afternoon thunderstorms and lots of cloudy skies and colorful sunsets. This is the cinematic summer weather I love the most!
Last night around sunset as a dark thunderstorm rolled in along the Sneffels Range, I was fiddling around with my new Sony A7R VI camera which just arrived in the mail that day. One big reason I bought the camera was for its "pre-capture" feature, which will continuously record a buffer of images at a high frame rate, and when you hit the shutter button it will save the previous ~1 second of images. This, theoretically, would allow me to capture lightning bolts without having to use a fiddly lightning trigger. Well, I was pretty excited to be able to test it out right away, and it works like a charm!
I just aimed the camera, half-pressed the shutter, and whenever I saw a bolt I hit the shutter and at 15-30 shots per second (over the previous 1 second) it captures the arc of the lightning over about 5-6 frames, allowing me to pick out the best moment. Easy peasy.
Perhaps this is a good omen for this camera that I caught a cool photo the very first time I used it!