Slow-Motion Lightning!

Right now there is this awesome lightning show with about 3-5 flashes per second mostly sheet lightning, but earlier it was slower but with pretty awesome fork lightning, and I got some videos with my high speed camera, I got 4 really good ones. My battery was dead when this started so I plugged it in for 2 mins, filmed for 2 mins and back and forth, so I missed a few good ones, but I did get the best 2.

The videos were filmed at 210 frames per second played back at 30, with Casio Exilim EX-FC100, If your curious. Forgive the quality, the lighting not ideal, ehemm... Anyyywayy, here they are!

#1:


#2:


#3:


#4, My favourite:


Tell me what ya think!

*UPDATE* I have been having storms over my city every 2-3 day since I recorded those videos. none were spectacular though, today after hearing what I thought was a 100lb. bomb going off in my neighbours garage, I grabbed my camera and went outside. It wasn't extremely interesting but I did get a cool video from it.(only one cause the storm lasted less than 30mins.)

Here it is:


Yay, 400th!

#4 is pretty crazy with the amount of strikes
We don't get anything like that here Just a single strike or two here and there.

This is the most lightning I've ever gotten, mostly just a few here and there too. It's been going steady for about 3 hours, and at least a group of flashes every 2-3 seconds, It's crazy, also our street is almost flooded.

The weird thing is when i was filming #4 I only saw about 4-5 flashes, but then when I saw the video I was like Holy Sh*t!

Excellent!

These images kind of give you respect for that sort of power... I've been very close to ground strikes and they've knocked the wind out of me. Luckily only near misses. (I do a lot of radio work.)

I've seen antennas completely melted by just the secondary 'leader' or 'feeler' arcs. Hopefully you were inside when you took those videos!

+1

I love rainstorms with lightning. Yes #4 was a jungle of plasma bolts. Sometimes those generate plasma balls that drop out of the sky and roll around sometimes burning things, sometimes not.

Good videos ..... you can get also better results, placing a camera fixed on a tripod, but this require normally a lot of work, after, for take and edit the lightning parts from the whole video ..... and a lot of luck, too (lightnings have the bad abitudes to hit where they want, not where you're filming ..... )

HumanSymphony said:

We don't get anything like that here Just a single strike or two here and there.

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Ehm ..... for me, a single strike is more than enough ..... if i'm on the path .....

I'm truly jealous, I hate you!

aryntha said:

Hopefully you were inside when you took those videos!

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I was actually in the middle of the street, but when I was taking those videos it was completely dry and absolutely no thunder so they were probably far away.

HIMNL9 said:

Good videos ..... you can get also better results, placing a camera fixed on a tripod, but this require normally a lot of work, after, for take and edit the lightning parts from the whole video ..... and a lot of luck, too (lightnings have the bad abitudes to hit where they want, not where you're filming ..... )

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The reason I was able to get these is i was using this pre-record function where it keep 2 seconds of video in it's buffer, so when I see one I just press the button and even if I'm late I still get it. Also if you can see in the video I'm sweeping across the sky because there was 2 distinct clouds that all the lightning was coming from.

FireMyLaser said:

I'm truly jealous, I hate you!

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Now why would that be?

*UPDATE* I have been having storms over my city every 2-3 day since I recorded those videos. none were spectacular though, today after hearing what I thought was a 100lb. bomb going off in my neighbours garage, I grabbed my camera and went outside. It wasn't extremely interesting but I did get a cool video from it.(only one cause the storm lasted less than 30mins.)

Here it is:

#4 was sweet - How do you like your Casio?

I have an EX-FS10 which is like the low end version of yours and although it does good video and the high speed stuff is awesome, noise gets terrible above ISO100, there's no manual mode and the longest exposure it does is like one second

Pics that have non-crap lighting look great, but forget about using it for night stuff : \

It's pretty much the same as the one you have but better optical zoom and a bigger CCD(I think) So the lowlight is a little better. The reason I bought it was for the highspeed, so I'm not to worried about the sub-par pic's, but they are good enough for me. Again it's just a point and shoot, so you cant expect to much. I love the slow-motion vids though. I had a whole collection on my computer, mostly shooting stuff, with a pellet gun, but I lost them when it crashed and I had to buy a new PC, an Alienware M15x.(love it)