Timing is everything

I was on an 11-day, 3500 mile road trip last week, and at one point in Colorado I got the opportunity to try and capture some really amazing lightning over the San Juan Mountains.  I set my Canon 7D up on the deck railing, attaching it with the Gorillapod Focus I bought for the trip (which I’ll be reviewing later), set a small aperture to give me a longish shutter speed to increase my chances of catching a flash, and started snapping away.  After about 300 photos, I’d caught maybe 6 strikes, with this being by far the best of them.

If it had been darker, I would likely have had more success, since I’d be able to have a longer shutter speed (this was taken at 1 second or so), which would give me a better ratio of shutter open to shutter closed time.  The split second timing and blind luck required to get these lightning photos reminded me of another photographic adventure I had a while ago, shooting water drops. I just used a ziploc bag with a pin hole in it, and relied on reflexes and luck to fire the lights at the right time, but after seeing work like the photo below by David Pearson (fpsurgeon on flickr), I’ve been interested in setting up a more automated solution to both increase the percentage of keepers, and to allow me to shoot more complex things like the droplet collision below.

To this end, I just went ahead and ordered up an Arduino Duemilanove, the book Getting Started with Arduino, and some accessories so I can put together a DIY trigger that will allow me to shoot stuff like this, along with other types of high-speed photography.  This will also serve the dual purpose of improving my knowledge of programming and basic electronics, so I like to look at it as killing three birds with one stone.  I’ll be chronicling my progress here at NerdsIRL, so keep an eye out for an update sometime after the Arduino and book arrive Wednesday!