Favorite Angels 2

Cemetery Stone Angel - Fairmount Cemetery, Davenport Iowa

This is one of my earliest photographs and unfortunately, I didn’t document any information about this monument. It was the first one that occurred to me to draw in eyes. That tends to freak people out! I love it because to me, it adds an element which is already there in the expression.

Stone Angels Gaze - Greenwood Cemetery, Muscatine IA

This is another one that tends to creep some people out. Personally, I think its beautiful. A larger image can be viewed and/or purchased here.

Dreaming Angel - Roseburg Oregon

This little angel is just a tiny little thing. I often see these small “lawn” size Angels proliferated across cemeteries and lawns alike across the country. She is the first one of her sort that I have seen, and may well be an original design. (So far as I have seen.)

Angels Tide - Pilot Butte Cemetery, Bend Oregon

Again a small “lawn” size ornament but so beautiful and gentle nonetheless. I feel very lucky to have stumbled across this little monument at just the right time to have caught the light like this. She’s not normally pink, but that was something I decided to add in post-processing the image.

More coming Soon!

Storm Chasing in Cemeteries? Don’t try this at home. #2

Lightning Strike near Juniper Haven Cemetery, Prineville OR

So you’re in a (relatively) safe location at your favorite cemetery with a great view of a killer storm. First of all… Holy Crap! Just be glad you made it this far. The elements line up so perfectly so rarely that you have just won the lottery, with a little bit of hard work. Now we’re going to try to win the lottery twice, because there’s not any precise way to catch lightning. (In case you haven’t noticed, the stuff moves pretty fast.)

Ideally, night time and low light is the best time to create lightning images. Late afternoon or early morning aren’t bad and mid day is simply terrible.

Regardless of the time of day you will need these items:

A Camera that will allow you to manually focus and set your aperture.
A tri-pod.
A remote shutter release, either cable or wireless remote.
Lots of luck.
A nice big set of cajones, realizing you stand a fair chance of literally catching a lightning bolt.

For night time photography, use this technique:

Set up your camera on the tri-pod and get the remote ready. If the lightning is sporadic, you might want to use more of a wide angle lens. The bolts will be smaller, but you can get some pretty neat lighting effects.

Lightning in the Cascades Mountains

If the lightning is coming close together in a relatively well defined area, you can zoom in more and get much more detail in the lightning itself. Either way, your image needs to be SHARP. You have to manually focus your lens to Infinity. The best way to do this is to allow your camera to auto-focus on a distant light source, and then switch your lens to manual focus. Often times digital lenses don’t have an infinity mark, and if they do it’s not totally accurate. (Bummer.)

Once your focus is set and you’re pointed in where you think the lightning might be, set your aperture to somewhere between 5.6  and 8. If you have a low ISO, between 50 – 250 you should get a shutter speed right around 30 seconds. 30 seconds is almost ideal for capturing lots of lightning! Sometimes you can get multiple strikes in one image if you so desire. (If not, you need a shorter shutter speed.)

In order to catch the lightning you simply take a picture and hope that lightning occurs in frame while your shutter is open.

For late evening or early morning, there’s already lots of light so you want the same ISO settings, but an aperture somewhere between 8 – 22. For somewhat day light shots you want a quicker shutter speed, 5 seconds or less usually. You may be quick enough to catch a strike when you see it, if it’s a slow strobing sort. Or you can again go with the guess work and just keep taking pictures, hoping the lightning will come down where you saw it last.

For daytime… Well, just throw it on landscape mode and randomly take pictures. Unless it’s a very slow spider web type of lightning (such as in the monsoons in Phoenix) it will be impossible for you to catch.

Memorize, eat and breathe the saftey tips from Post #1! Know what to do when lightning gets close or too close, and know what part of the storm to drive into and which to avoid!

If you manage to catch a lightning picture, congratulations! It is one of the most difficult events to capture on film.