August 17 Lightning

[KHarmon]

Went out last night and caught the tail end of a thunder storm that died just before it reached my home which desperately needs the moisture. For some reason, I don't know if it is due to the rain, but a lot of my night time shots have a purple tint to the clouds. Any guesses as to why that is???? Also posted these to my Project 52 thread. Comments and critique always appreciated.

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KHarmon

[Donald]

Well done on getting the lightning.

I understand that you may have included the land in order to add context, but I think the lights are a bit of a distraction. I wonder if it would help just to clone them out?

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Kris,

I slightly prefer the second, because lightning less blown, but they are both reasonable shots of something that interest me.

Your questions about the purple tinge is white balance related, looking at the EXIF data shows Auto (which is what I use most of the time).

We don't have enough lightning here in UK to allow me any experience with this kind of shot, but I suspect the WB gets set at the beginning of the exposure and is determined by the background illumination, which is a different WB to the lightning, or maybe the Auto WB just isn't so good on a Rebel XS at these low levels. Try setting a fixed one (say Daylight or Shade), you can see which looks best by trying different ones in PP (assuming your PSP allows that and you shot RAW).

A couple of other observations,

I noticed many stuck/hot pixels - at first I thought they were stars, but there are red ones, green ones and blue ones. Not sure if Canon has any means of masking those to save you having to clone them out each time, perhaps someone else can advise (I'm a Nikon shooter).

The lights Donald refers to do show some camera shake in a vertical direction, perhaps as you pressed the shutter button, try using the 2 second self timer to start the exposure to avoid. This advice given assuming you don't wait for the lightning then take the picture, if you are, then that won't help because you'll miss it - you'll need a remote release in this case.

Cheers,

[Radu Dinu Cordeanu]

In pp you could modify the colours as you want very easily >enhance>adjust colour>adjust hue/saturation>magentas to obtain something like that

then with gradient tool you could obtain what colour you want,i.e. a deep blue.