JimNicholsNSN

Catching Lightning

I was on my way out of the house with my daughter. We’re in the car, leaving the neighborhood and we see these intensely powerful lightning bolts. I pull ov...
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I was on my way out of the house with my daughter. We’re in the car, leaving the neighborhood and we see these intensely powerful lightning bolts. I pull over, but all I have is my cell phone for photos. Cell phone pictures are amazing these days, but my shutter lag is too painful to try and catch lightning. This is normally done using a camera that has a high rate of frames per second (fps). So you can hold down the shutter button and it will take pictures like a machine gun. Do this a few times, and chances are, one of those frames will catch lightning. My LG G4 (android) was not up for that task. So to work with what I have, I shot an HD Video for about 44 seconds. This frame was sitting at 38 seconds. When we got home I searched on google play for an app that will convert video to photos. The first one I downloaded didn’t really work for me. The second one I downloaded (and used for this picture) is called “Video to Image” – simple enough, right? This worked well for what I wanted. (If you have another app you recommend, please let us know in the comments) So after I saved this frame from the video. I opened it up in another photo editing app that I highly recommend, called “Snapseed” (and it’s free!) I used Snapseed to tune the image by darkening the clouds a bit to bring out the feeling of drama and to accentuate the glow of the lightning bolt. All of this was done within the cell phone.

I hope you like this quick tutorial on How I Caught Lightning. Check out the Before & after slider below – I love that thing! Also, I’m so excited, the end result picture has now been featured in my local paper, The Frederick News Post, Storm Photos.
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