Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

The last few thunderstorms had a) brushed past just far enough south to avoid showing lightning north of Lombard St., b) only had clout-to-cloud lightning, c) passed too quickly for more than one or two flashes, or d) gone by while I was asleep or in the wrong part of the house. But last night, I got my chance to use the downtown skyline in a lightning photo. I attached the camera to a cymbal stand and stuck the boom out the window, and had it click off frames as quickly as it could store them (which isn't really very fast for exposures longer than about half a second -- it has to think a lot longer after the shutter closes than it does after exposures of more ordinary length).

Sunrise the day before brought a very pink sky containing clouds of varying degrees of saturation, all red or pink.

In the heat we've been having lately, during much of the day my view of downtown is distorted by heat shimmer and/or haze (and yesterday afternoon I saw an advertising banner in the sky but found it difficuly to spot the aeroplane that was towing it -- the plane, when I finally found it, was painted a colour in between that of the clouds and the cast of the haze). For the most part, the hot-air ripples just make what I'm trying to photograph even more blurry than the borrowed department-store telescope and doubler ("Barlow lens") already make it (in effect, it's a 1400mm, f/22 lens with very little chromatic or spherical correction; multiple blurrinesses built in even before adding vibration, and I'm having plenty of trouble controlling vibration as well, but it's still fun) ... but a week ago I managed to catch the effect in a more contained way, in the hot exhaust of a Maryland State Police helicopter coming in for a landing at UMMC.