lightning 20Aug08

[johngpt]

From the same storm on 20Aug08 as my post lightning_042, comes this image. It's a composite of two photos, each with a shutter speed of 8 seconds, f/5.6, ISO 100. As the camera was on a tripod, each of the two photos were in register, so compositing was relatively easy, and there was no need to create a panoramic view. As with lightning_042, because the storm was quite far off, at least half the image was cropped out.

After compositing the two, I noticed that the two flashes were so equal in intensity, that neither ended up being a focal point of the image. My eye couldn't settle upon one versus the other. So I tried a levels adjustment layer darkening all the mid tones, and created a gradient from black to foreground in its layer mask, so that only one side of the image was affected by the adjustment layer. So now, only one of the flashes predominates. I hope it works.