Lightning images

how long does the lighting exist?
I mean if the trigger reacts it needs to activate the camera and there is a delay before the camera is actually making a photo, so does it really work?

They must work. Otherwise they would not get $329.00 for one.
The speed of the detecting circuit is quite fast, like in low milliseconds.

actually that circiut looks kinda familiar... how about soldering a pc socket cable to a miniphono plug and plugging a flash slave (wein) into your camera's remote release socket?

Never tried it. But I don't think the Wein is sensitive enough for lightning. I've tried using other optical triggers for cameras. But they are not sensitive enough.
The circuit I posted has picked up a flash fired in another room down the hall in my house.

If you want to run the previous circuit from an auto. Like when out in the field.
You can use this circuit to regulate the supply from the vehicle.
[IMG]http://i630.photobucket.com/albums/uu25/wildlifephotog/regulator-circuit.jpg[/IMG]

Here is a circuit that can be used also. It is 9 volt battery powered.
[IMG]http://i630.photobucket.com/albums/uu25/wildlifephotog/lightning_circuit-9vdc.jpg[/IMG]
http://web.mit.edu/kumpf/www/projects/LightningPhoto/index.html

I'd been thinking about building a lightning trigger myself.

A couple of points to note. You can get better sensitivity and faster response by using a photodiode as the detector instead of an LDR. In addition, if the camera's shutter trigger input is reasonably "friendly" you can switch it faster with a transistor instead of a relay but this does mean polarity is important.

You can also trigger using the radio waves generated by a lightning strike but it won't be directional, of course.

..and these circuits will indeed also double as a slave flash trigger with little or no modification.

A couple more designs that I've been pondering:

link
link

I actually have a collection of bits I've been meaning to assemble into one so I'll report back when I've done a bit of experimentation. Not that there's anything other than drizzle to photograph currently!

Kevin

I don't question the trigger I question that the delay of the trigger plus the delay of the camera is fast enough.

But like you said they will probably work.

Then still you want to have a bit longer shutter speed so that you capture some surrounding instead of only lighting, so meaning you have an exposure of 3 to 9 seconds like Don suggested earlier.

The lag in the circuit and shutter is less than the usual 100ms duration of a lightning strike.

First thoughts on seeing the posted images :

1. Beautiful. Awsome power of mother nature

2. Easy to fake. And most of the shots are beautifully staged and composed. Possibly too much so.

3. Are all the shots from the same photographer or from diferent ones.

I'd hazard that a majority of these shots were taken in the US, and from personal experience, their thunder storms tend to be longer lasting, and of a different flavour to UK thunder storms.

An electrical storm in Tampa took about an hour to roll out to sea from well inland, and had some incredible cloud to cloud lightening strikes. Looking back, I wish I had my K10d, but, that was some 15 years ago *laughs*

Put another way, the storms tend to longer and more vivid in the America's (and probably Australia and other 'tropical' climes), so you can risk picking your framing and waiting, and still be pretty much guarenteed a lightening strike to occur in your field of view.

One of the worst storms I've ever been in, was in June 2006. It lasted 12 hours and the lightning was nonstop the whole time. It blew transformers off poles in my neighborhood. Blew a brick chimmney off a house down the road.

It is very easy to get huge lightning strike photos just about anywhere in the USA. We even get lightning in snow storms.

Lag in the circuit is no problem, but I do not believe there is any way the Pentax mirror will raise in time for most lightning strikes to be captured. I'm not sure about the mirror on any SLR for that mater. Perhaps if you could truly lock up the mirror, I am sure this would be plausible.

Many pictures from many SLRs and DSLRs taken with these kind of circuits beg to differ

The answer to this might be here in the Instruction manual and Tips on that link that Kris mentioned: