Photography lightning - the lightning portrait by Lewis Whyld

The lightning portrait…

I’ve been photographing lightning for some time and realised it would make a great backdrop for a portrait. It was many storms later before I had the opportunity. I was in Kenya during the elections and found myself in the wilderness with an anti-poaching ranger as a storm rolled in. I didn’t have a tripod or anything I’d normally use to shoot lightning (I have a post about how I shoot lightning coming in the near future) so I had to improvise. Coupled with the fact that it was still daylight and it made for very challenging conditions.

I knew time was limited, we had maybe a minute or two before we’d be hit by the most monumental downpour so I positioned myself in what I imagined was the best position and began shooting. The ranger was fairly restless in the minute or so that I was shooting pictures, so I was trying to shoot fast enough shutter speeds to reduce the movement whilst long enough to raise my chances of capturing some lightning…

Then boom! There was a flash followed almost immediately by the most almighty clap of thunder, that was our cue to run for the vehicle and as we did so giant blobs of rain began to smash down. Jumping in the truck I quickly scrolled through my images and there it was, my first portrait using real lightning as a backdrop.

I considered cropping the picture to make the most of the lightning, but I decided to leave it full frame, I’d be crazy to crop that sky out! Since I was shooting in a personal capacity this picture has never been published until now.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 4th, 2013 at 12:48 pm. It is filed under Photography and tagged with elections, kenya, lightning, Photography, photojournalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.