Lightning Inside of a WaterSpout..Unbelievable Picture

Originally posted by JustAThought
I can assure you that guy is not a pro photographer. He probably wishes he was. I'm not either, but i've been in photography school and dropped out after a year . . And i promise you ANYONE who knows just BASIC shutter techniques can see that this is not the case.

If it was a shutter issue, the width of the lightning as a whole tells just how blurry each and every single tree on the picture should be. You would hardly be able to make anything out. . .

NO. That is absolutely NOT correct, and as it has been repeated a few times, it needs to be put to bed.

An image that is recorded over a measurable length of time, will of course only show those things that are ILLUMINATED sufficiently for them to appear... but it will show *everything* that is so illuminated during the entire exposure time..

Agreed?

If there is a particularly bright BUT SHORT flash (esp one that illuminates the sky), then the camera will, at that small moment during the entire exposure, SHARPLY record the treeline and any other items illuminated by that flash.

Agreed?

During the rest of the exposure, other bright objects -eg a second LESS BRIGHT, BUT MORE LONG LASTING strike - will be recorded *including motion blur*, although that LESS BRIGHT strike may NOT necessarily illuminate the sky or treeline!

Agreed?

Thus, the treeline can indeed be BRIEFLY illuminated by a very bright but short flash. It will therefore be recorded sharply and if, during the rest of the exposure, the treeline is NOT sufficiently illuminated there will be no double or blurred image of the treeline.

But other elements of the image may well be motion blurred as explained above.


As I have said on many other threads, photogrammetry (image analysis) is NOT simple, and you need to be very careful about making quick judgements and not thinking about all the possibilities. Maybe it helps that I *do* a fair bit of time exposure photography, and I've seen many (and taken a few!) examples where different parts of the image are recorded sharply, while others are motion blurred, because of the same simple effect. Anyone who does *serious* flash-augmented photography at night, will know this.

So, I REPEAT, the sharp treeline DOES NOT prove that other areas of the image cannot be motion blurred.

Originally posted by MelonMusketeer
I don't know yet how to post a photograph here, or I would post 100% crops of the original showing the two areas in question, the power pole, which is a big one, about 60 or 70 ft tall, and the other smaller bolt of lightning in the upper right corner of the shot. The land mass that the lightning is over is only about 50 meters wide, crossing a 3/4 mile wide bay.

Hi Melon Musketeer! Welcome to ATS. I tried your link and it didn't work so if you can upload the pics here that would be great! Here's how:

At the top, click "member tools" and click "my pictures" from the drop-down menu.

Then click "upload picture" at the upper left.

Fill in the blank fields for picture caption like "Lightning in waterspout?" and
Description like "taken in Florida on this date....."

You can use the default album "my photos" (or create new album names using "manage photo albums" like you did on your gallery site).

Then click on "browse" to point to the location of the photo on your hard drive.

Then click "add photo"

The photo is now uploaded. To use it in a post, click the thumbnail, and then copy the link that says "embed on ATS".

Paste that link into your post and the photo will appear in your post, but it will be truncated to 600 pixels wide. To add a scroll bar to the photo, edit the tags from

atsimg

to

img

So just delete the letters "ats" from the beginning and ending tags and the scroll bar will appear so people can see the full image.

Thanks in advance! It's a really amazing photo whatever it is, and I enjoyed your other galleries also.

Regards,

Arby

[edit on 27-5-2010 by Arbitrageur]

Sorry if this has already been covered.. but I think I might have a good guess as to what this is.. I think it might be two lightning bolts side by side.. like an identical twin or "clone".. and the area between them could be them interacting with each other.. like arcing off each other or superheated air/moisture between them.

Originally posted by CHRLZ

Originally posted by JustAThought
I can assure you that guy is not a pro photographer. He probably wishes he was. I'm not either, but i've been in photography school and dropped out after a year . . And i promise you ANYONE who knows just BASIC shutter techniques can see that this is not the case.

If it was a shutter issue, the width of the lightning as a whole tells just how blurry each and every single tree on the picture should be. You would hardly be able to make anything out. . .

NO. That is absolutely NOT correct, and as it has been repeated a few times, it needs to be put to bed.

An image that is recorded over a measurable length of time, will of course only show those things that are ILLUMINATED sufficiently for them to appear... but it will show *everything* that is so illuminated during the entire exposure time..

Agreed?

If there is a particularly bright BUT SHORT flash (esp one that illuminates the sky), then the camera will, at that small moment during the entire exposure, SHARPLY record the treeline and any other items illuminated by that flash.

Agreed?

During the rest of the exposure, other bright objects -eg a second LESS BRIGHT, BUT MORE LONG LASTING strike - will be recorded *including motion blur*, although that LESS BRIGHT strike may NOT necessarily illuminate the sky or treeline!

Agreed?

Thus, the treeline can indeed be BRIEFLY illuminated by a very bright but short flash. It will therefore be recorded sharply and if, during the rest of the exposure, the treeline is NOT sufficiently illuminated there will be no double or blurred image of the treeline.

But other elements of the image may well be motion blurred as explained above.


As I have said on many other threads, photogrammetry (image analysis) is NOT simple, and you need to be very careful about making quick judgements and not thinking about all the possibilities. Maybe it helps that I *do* a fair bit of time exposure photography, and I've seen many (and taken a few!) examples where different parts of the image are recorded sharply, while others are motion blurred, because of the same simple effect. Anyone who does *serious* flash-augmented photography at night, will know this.

So, I REPEAT, the sharp treeline DOES NOT prove that other areas of the image cannot be motion blurred.

What a bunch of absolute rubbish. . . Are you making up this garbage as you go along ?

The speed of all the light is the same. . . Darker objects reflected light dosnt move slower than the light of a lightning.

There lots of other lightsources here than the lightning.

Everything you said is RUBBISH.

Agreed ?

[edit on 27-5-2010 by JustAThought]

"Justathought" your 'thoughtful' rebuttal, carefully measured and dealing with each item, was breathtaking.

But I guess I missed it - which was the bit you disagreed with, and why?

And before you go down this path (against a photographer who actually knows the topic), may I suggest you Google the following term, and see what you find. See if you can work out why it might be relevant. Are you ready? Here is the term:
"front curtain flash"

Actually "rear curtain flash", or even just "flash synch" would also turn up the sort of stuff you need to understand (they would probably have covered it later in the course you flunked out of).. If you read carefully and follow the rabbit, and think really hard about how a flash might be a bit like lightning... and how the scene was NOT evenly lit throughout the 1/8 second exposure time...

So do think about it all before returning, look at the images that turn up, and perhaps also read the comments made by the guy who actually took the image:

That leads me to also believe that this was camera motion which caused the "wide" look. The camera may have been moving as the bolt was disintegrating, causing the horizontal lines in the blurred section....
It was very high energy lightning, with many of the strikes being multiple strokes. That is why I was shooting at 1/8 sec, and triggering the shutter when I saw light. I captured 3 strokes in about 20 shots, this being the only one with the ground sharp..."

Any of that getting through? Can you join up those rather large and obvious dots? That the scene was NOT evenly illuminated throughout the exposure period, and that one BRIGHT but SHORTLIVED strike may have frozen the treeline?

Anyway, I REPEAT, if everything I said was rubbish, it should be quite easy for you to point out the specific bits and debate them - I repeat - WHICH BIT WAS WRONG, specifically, and why?


[edit on 27-5-2010 by CHRLZ]

Originally posted by JustAThought
The speed of all the light is the same. . . Darker objects reflected light dosnt move slower than the light of a lightning.

There lots of other lightsources here than the lightning.

That may be true about other lightsources. But I think CHRLZ has a valid theory. Watch this video:

Originally posted by Arbitrageur

Look at the main strike about about 5 seconds, it's very bright. The rest of the video after that shows the same shape but at a much dimmer intensity, which could be the "blurred" image we see and called a waterspout.

There is a very bright flash about 4-5 seconds into that slo-mo video. I think he's right that bright flash could illuminate the treeline. The remaining video shows lightning which perhaps is bright enough to register directly as a blur, but perhaps not brightly enough to illuminate the tree line, if the lightning strikes in the video and the photograph were similar.

And even though there may be other light sources as you say, the bright flash at about 4-5s could dominate a photograph.

This really can be a complicated science and CHRLZ really does know his stuff regarding photography. But I can understand why it's not obvious, some of these concepts and interactions are subtle and take some experience to understand.

I'm not ready to say his explanation is proven fact yet as I still want to examine a high resolution image. But it's very plausible, as strange as it may seem. And after I watched that video, I'm even more convinced of that.

Thanks for your comments and example, Arb.

As another example of what happens during time exposures around lightning, try here:
www.flickr.com...
(Not my image)
That was an 8 second exposure in a moving car.. Look at the trails of the car lights down either side, and you can see how much the camera moved in that time. Yet look at the lightning and the horizon - quite sharp, simply because that strike was so brief, and IT was the light source that lit the sky and silhouetted the horizon. For the rest of those 8 seconds, the horizon was not backlit, and so it did not get blurred.

So all you need to add is a slower, longer lasting strike to get the effect seen on the OP photo (which I think is a great image, by the way).
And those longer strikes do happen, as any storm watcher will attest - not all bolts of lightning are fast.

reply to post by JustAThought


Thats how you left after a year, the lightning was like a huge flashgun LOOK at the facts 800 asa f6.7 1/8 of a second the initial flash was bright enough to light up the surrounding area then the remaing light recorded as the blur effect and as it was not bright enough to show blur on the surroundings.
Look how dark the surrounding area was 800 asa is a high speed 1/8 at that speed would let a lot of light on the sensor yet its not over exposed and the shot looks good ,you should know that

Look at these flash pics which show similar effects

digital-photography-school.com...

This one show what is meant quite well

No flash top ,first shutter curtain sync second, second shutter curtain sync at the bottom

www.davidfenwick.co.uk...

"The lightning was about a mile from the boat"

second line

Thats pretty cool dude, i will google this and see what google knows about it

reply to post by Tunatarian


You're wrong. As an above-amateur photographer myself, I can tell you that for lightning shots, the shutter speed actually needs to be slow, like really slow. Because no matter how fast your shutter speed is, your finger will not be able to push on the shutter release in the amount of time that lightning strikes. It moves, obviously, at the speed of light. Anyway, I can tell this picture is real. And it's incredible. S+F.

EDIT: Grammar.

[edit on 5/27/2010 by Schmidt1989]

Ok! With some helpful tips from "Arbitrageur" I got it done. Thanks "A" .







Photos © 2010 W Thompson
The land is beyond the power line. The poles are in the water. The water is salt water, a great conductor.

That was tedious to post, but maybe it will get easier after I learn how this site works.
The first is the whole frame as shot, reduced to 640 pixels wide. The other two are full resolution, cropped from the unedited image file.



[edit on 27-5-2010 by MelonMusketeer]

Originally posted by sligtlyskeptical
reply to post by earth2

 

Cool Pic. I have seen waterspouts but nothing quite like this. Wonder why the lightning was contained to the waterspout? Maybe this picture will lead science to learn a bit about both.

I think they already figured it out along time ago.

water is a great conductor

It does not matter if this picture of a lighting bolt passing through a water spout is real or not-
The point being;
THINK OF A WATER SPOUT FORMING OVER THE OIL SLICK IN THE GULF AND SUCKING UP OIL AND GAS FUMES AND THEN HAVING IT IGNITE.
IT WOULD LOOK LIKE A TACTICAL NUKE GOING OFF.....kmg

reply to post by MelonMusketeer
Thanks for uploading the images!

Glad my instructions made sense.

It gets a little easier after you've done it a few times.

But I was trying to look at it like in the 2nd (cropped) image you posted but all the way up to the cloud. The horizontal limit that can be displayed is 600 pixels but with the scroll bar there is no pixel limit, and there's no vertical pixel limit that I'm aware of.

Do you not want to post the full sized image for some reason? That's fine of you don't, but the taller crop would be nice to see the full lightning strike.

Thanks.

Originally posted by MelonMusketeer
Ok! With some helpful tips from "Arbitrageur" I got it done. Thanks "A" .

Thanks, Melon - it's a great shot, and a really interesting one to dissect.

There's one thing I'd like to hear your comment on - as I've said, my theory is that there was one very bright flash, that gave the sharp treeline and the main bolt, and then I believe there may have been a slower one that caused the 'motion blur' effect.

Now the more I stare at that motion blur, the more I think the camera may have gone through an 'arcing' motion. Look at the bottom of the 'spout', and note the dome-shape, half-circle effect. Then look at all the details running up the strike - that same hemispherical effect is there. as if the camera moved up and over and down again, in an almost perfect circular motion. I've seen that effect before, when the camera was most likely 'bumped' slightly.

At some point I'd love to analyse the full-res version, if you get it posted (ie a full res crop of the entire strike, top to bottom). Feel free to whack a copyright message over it!

Using the first image posted, out of interest, I created a 'vector' that measured the distance between the bottom two points of the areas I believe were motion blurred. I then duplicate that vector exactly and placed it at various points all the way up the 'spout', and... it matched. Every bit of the spout has the same apparent displacement, within a pixel width. Either that's an amazingly consistent natural effect, or the motion blur theory might just have something going for it.. Here's an enlarged view, showing the red vectors - I humbly apologise for the defacing of your image!! It has been gamma adjusted to better show the effect, and cropped:
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/98fcd8b67dd1.jpg[/atsimg]

I'm happy to remove that image if you don't want it displayed in that way, and will remove it anyway after the thread has run its course.

Note that this was just a quick play, but I'm happy to repeat the work with more accuracy on the entire strike, if that's available and you have no objection. And there are a few provisos to that sort of analysis-conclusion, which I can elaborate on later.

Either way, thanks for a *really* interesting image!

I might have missed it amongst the photography lessons but has no one thought of the effect a lightning bolt would have on a column of water?

The words "almost instantaneous violent decomposition" spring to mind.

It is obviously shake during the exposure but it is still a nice photograph.

[edit on 28/5/2010 by LightFantastic]

reply to post by CHRLZ

Yes a higher resolution image would be nice and marked copyright is fine too. The full image is too low a resolution to analyze conclusively.

I do see the arc you mention.

A few more random thoughts:

the illumination of the blurred image, if that's what it is, is not uniform. It gradually becomes brighter on the right side, almost in the exact manner we would expect a uniformly illuminated waterspout to become brighter. So that's an amazing coincidence that it creates a cylinder illusion.

Another "pro-blur" observation is that if this was an illuminated cylinder, wouldn't we expect to see a similar effect on the left side of the waterspout? And we don't.

And I looked through a few pages of waterspouts to see if I could find any resembling this image, and the shape is different.

www.google.com...:1&sa=N&start=20&ndsp=20

The edges are more jagged and defined on this one, and perhaps not coincidentally, in a pattern that roughly matches the shape of the lightning strike though a higher resolution image would reveal more detail about that. Almost all the waterspouts seem to have the ground effect spray that could be hidden beneath the tree line but it would be relatively short if that were so.

If it's motion blur, I would have hoped to see the slightest shadow of displaced treeline illumination corresponding with the brightish part of the blur on the right. But it's possible the reason we don't see that, is that the real contrast in light intensity between the main strike and the brightest part of the blur on the right is far greater in reality than what the image shows, due to saturation by the main lightning strike.

Originally posted by LightFantastic
I might have missed it amongst the photography lessons but has no one thought of the effect a lightning bolt would have on a column of water?

The words "almost instantaneous violent decomposition" spring to mind.

It is obviously shake during the exposure but it is still a nice photograph.

[edit on 28/5/2010 by LightFantastic]

Yep, I agree - I did raise this point a page or two back, but no-one ran with it. So thanks!

I agree - I think the effect of a strike in/on a waterspout would be 'marked', to say the least. In fact I also suspect that the reason such a thing has never been captured is that it would probably demolish the spout at both ends, and possibly the bolt would simply be dissipated or redirected. And of course if the (salt)waterspout is in operation, there is *already* a reasonably good conductor (way better than air) in place, and so maybe there would be no arc at all, just some other sort of slower, gentler conduction of the charge.

But I'm no expert on lightning, so these are w-a-guesses..!

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
...
Yes a higher resolution image would be nice and marked copyright is fine too. The full image is too low a resolution to analyze conclusively.
I do see the arc you mention.

A few more random thoughts:

the illumination of the blurred image, if that's what it is, is not uniform. It gradually becomes brighter on the right side, almost in the exact manner we would expect a uniformly illuminated waterspout to become brighter. So that's an amazing coincidence that it creates a cylinder illusion.

Another "pro-blur" observation is that if this was an illuminated cylinder, wouldn't we expect to see a similar effect on the left side of the waterspout? And we don't.

And I looked through a few pages of waterspouts to see if I could find any resembling this image, and the shape is different.
...

The edges are more jagged and defined on this one, and perhaps not coincidentally, in a pattern that roughly matches the shape of the lightning strike though a higher resolution image would reveal more detail about that. Almost all the waterspouts seem to have the ground effect spray that could be hidden beneath the tree line but it would be relatively short if that were so.

If it's motion blur, I would have hoped to see the slightest shadow of displaced treeline illumination corresponding with the brightish part of the blur on the right. But it's possible the reason we don't see that, is that the real contrast in light intensity between the main strike and the brightest part of the blur on the right is far greater in reality than what the image shows, due to saturation by the main lightning strike.

All very good points. As an addition to your very observant last sentence, I believe he said it was a Fuji S3, a DSLR that - interestingly - has a well-deserved reputation for having a wide dynamic range... (I'm a bit of a Fuji fan, as it happens..) Which means it would cope better than most cameras with the extremes of the bright strike versus the lesser motion blurred one. But I agree, I think it is a little unusual (but definitely not impossible) that there is no apparent trace of treeline (or waves) blurring...

Melon, any chance of the full res image, or a cropped area showing more of the strike at 100% (actual pixel) size? Maybe even a link to the RAW file, if it exists? I have Fuji raw converter software...