Tonight there was a nice big storm rolling into the Orlando area. As I drove home I could see how massive the extent was, and realized there was no leading edge of rain just yet. Once I got home I went outside figuring there may be an opportunity to capture some interesting lightning shots. Mounted my Rokinon 8mm FE to my T3i, mounted the T3i to a tripod, and outside I went.
The majority of the shots looked like this:
10 sec exposure, ISO 800, probably f/8. That is a plane on approach to Orlando Exec Airport - they fly overhead a fair bit in this exact pattern.
I took many shots of various exposures and apertures and ISOs, playing around with longer captures to see how the sky looked compared to quick snaps that were only a half-second long. No bolts of lightning, just cloud-to-cloud "heat lightning", I guess it's called.
But then I caught these two orange-colored blobs, looking almost like helicopter search lights, traveling along in rough formation, with a slower-than-helicopter pace, and not a uniform pace - kind of meandering, like wafting on a breeze. This is the whole shot, where you can see one of them (the other is behind a tree):
Here's a close up, where you can see that second blob:
Here is a later shot (28 seconds later, according to timestamps):
And here is a multi-layer of a collection of the images I took:
This is one out of every four of a series of shots from one POV, eight shots total. I took about 36 shots in total, from three different camera angles, including a few shots from a view where I didn't even realize I captured them in the photo until later.
Sorry for posting a fifth image, but I thought they were all needed to help demonstrate the context. You will note that the blobs are in the general vicinity of the aircraft in the first photo of this post, but not moving in the same direction. The tree just to the right of the airplane trail is the same tree to the upper left of the pergola in the "blob" photos - you can see a tiny bit of the pergola in the airplane trail shot.
The movement of these objects was left to right from my perspective, and moving away from me - net direction was to the east, and the storm was moving in from the west. The cloud cover was fairly low - an aircraft on approach to Orlando Exec was hidden by cloud about 5 minutes earlier. Approach altitude above ground seems to usually be about 2000-2500 ft at my location, I would guess, which is consistent with a typical IFR approach. So these blobs were probably no higher than that, or else they would have been lost in the clouds.
All shots are at f/3.5, and 0.5 sec exposure, ISO 1600 for earlier shots and 3200 for the later ones. These are all SOOC jpgs, with only a resize for Web and my watermark added, except the multi-layer, which has several layers fiddled with brightness and contrast. (I need to figure out a good way to layer these images...any suggestions?)
No, I didn't ingest or inhale anything strange tonight, and anyway, these are the shots.
At first I was trying to figure out what they were by thinking of helicopters - but no way would the Orange County Sheriff be out with that storm coming in, and there was no chopper noise anyway. I thought they might be some kind of flare, but who would shoot up a flare? And anyway, they didn't slowly drop like a flare - they just floated. Timestamp of the first photo where I can see them is 9:39:42pm, last shot I took was at 9:41:06pm.
I have more, if folks are interested. Or browse my photobucket where I have more (not all posted there yet - I didn't think my photobucket needed them all right away, but I'll stuff more there if you like).
I wish I had thought to also take outside with me a second body with my with my 70-200 or 100-400 mounted, but on the other hand, to my naked eye there was no structure, so it might not have shown anything other than a larger blob.
shinksma
Gotta be a better way, but the trees were moving in the breeze, so they get a bit blurred out if I include them, and if I average out the sky it gets pretty bland looking too...
), they don't have this type of lighting.
