Lightning storm over Sanibel Island
 

On the night of June 20th, a spectacular lightning storm took place over the Gulf of Mexico while Connie and I were on Sanibel Island, so I set up the GoPro and crossed my fingers that I had it set up well enough to capture lightning flashes. Honestly, when I just scanned the resulting footage the following day, all I saw was nothing but darkness, so I thought I blew it. But when I got home and looked again, I was surprised to see that it all didn't turn out too badly. Actually turned out better than I had hoped it would, all things considered.

I cut and pasted the flashes out of all the dark footage to make this video. Originally there were 5 clips I took, each between 10 and 15 minutes long. So this got all condensed down to about 7 minutes of actual useable video.

Please note that this is an extremely contrasty video with black background and very bright flashes of lightning. So if that sort of thing bothers your eyes, you may not want to watch this.

Oh, there seems to be a very annoying buzz watching the YouTube version of this video that is not there in the original. So I'm guessing it is some sort of artifact introduced by the YouTube processing. Sorry about that. I wanted to capture audio along with the video as the thunder was a nearly constant rumble and roar the entire time.

Thinking back on it, maybe I should have tried a video in slow motion during the actual lightning flashes. Maybe I'll putter around trying that when I get a chance. FYI, YouTube does have a couple of settings to slow the video down during display that you may want to try out if the flashing is taking place too quickly for your eyes to adjust to.

Lightning storms are awesome! Dotty and I were flying back to Boston from
Tampa one night and we started seeing lightning flashes outside. The inside of
the plane was very dark as most of the people onboard were either trying to sleep or watch the tv. I grabbed the camcorder and started filming the storm
which was below us. Got some really nice video of cloud to ground and cloud
to cloud lightning below us. Nice video you put together as well! I guess that
the more you play with the GoPro's the more things you find out how to do.
It would be interesting if you could do time lapse in IR and see what's going
on outside your place at night. Illuminate the yard with IR and do a time lapse
with the GoPro. I've often thought about doing an IR timelapse of my backyard
just to see how many skunks it takes to generate that gawd awful smell! :lmao:
Andy :wavey: