The perspective is toward downtown from the northwest side of town. (You are looking southeast.) The tornado can be seen on the left side of the frame. The picture was apparently taken after the tornado had passed through downtown Atlanta, and while it was hitting the nearby Cabbagetown neighborhood.
Just outside the frame, to the left, imagine me hunkered down in my living room, looking a lot like this: :eek:
No way, man.
I heard that if you play Dark Side of the Moon while looking at this pic, when the crash at the end of On the Run happens, theres an explosion!
I’m wondering what his f stop was and whether he used a tripod. (You’d think he’d have to because it was at night, but I’m surprised that the buildings aren’t more focused given how quickly the shutter must have snapped because there’s no movement in the clouds.)
Judging by the tiny, tiny image provided and not knowing what camera he used, they either used a surface available to them or a tripod. Regardless, the ISO was huge, and it was probably a DSLR with an ISO at or above 800. (You can tell by the noise). The apeture was as big as they could get it, so probably a few stops beyond F2.8 set to infinity. Shutterspeed was at least 1/50, probably much higher, around 1/120 or quicker.
ETA: The buildings are in focus, just not properly exposed. Exposing a skyline at night with a digital, no matter how expensive, is a tremendous bitch. The lights from the building are always overexposed and the city itself is always under. There are ways to do this, like hyperexposing or whatever it’s called, but it’s not easy with fast moving subjects.
Jared, who has photographed the BoA and all of the Atlanta skyline thousands of times.
Growing up in a part of tornado ally I was always in awe of the lighting & cloud formations during storms - dangerous most of the time but also beautiful.
It was amazing to see the GA superdome shaking during the Basketball tourney…My Mississippi State Bulldogs pulled out a win even with the tornado delay
I also live just a teeny bit to the left/north of this photo (Midtown near Piedmont Park), but my reaction was, “Gosh, that’s loud thunder. Back to Brawl!”
We never lost power or noticed sirens or anything.
Really? I didn’t lose power, but I had strong wind, and hail coming in sideways to pelt my windows. It was bad enough that I thought to slip on my shoes, in case I needed to make an escape of some sort. (I didn’t want to be interviewed on the evening news in my sock feet.) A few minutes later, there were multiple emergency vehicles (police, ambulances, fire trucks) blaring up and down the road.
I do live on a busy street, though…and I live a bit closer to Cabbagetown than you, I guess.
Yes. Although I didn’t lose power either, and my lines are aboveground. Neighborhoods southeast of downtown did lose power, though. (The Old Fourth Ward, e.g.)
Scary looking weather. I’m moving back to Tornado Country (Kansas City) in about a week. About 9 months ago, before I moved to Hawaii, I helped to rebuild in Greensburg, Kansas where the F5 hit last spring. My first sight of the town (or rather lack of one), was so surreal. I felt like I was in one of those sci-fi, post-apocalyptic movies. 95% of the town was leveled. Freaky.
I’m not happy to be moving back. Had a tornado come within a mile of my home once. It was exciting, but I wouldn’t call it pleasant.
I live just north of MARJORIE on Piedmont. All I got was lots of wind and rain, but by midnight I was downtown removeing broken glass from The Chandler Building. Tonight is the first night that I’ve gotten off before 11:00pm all week. One thing I don’t understand is why The Westin waited untill falling glass started to hit people on the street to remove the broken glass. And there are still buildings with glass falling.
The clouds are lit by the lightning, so you could have a fairly long exposure and not record any movement in the clouds. Normally, when taking lightning pictures, you choose a fairly low ISO, like 200, aim for a medium to high f-stop of about f/8 to f/16, dial in an exposure that doesn’t overpower your image with too much ambient light (this could be anything from a second to fifteen seconds). The long exposure improves your odds of catching a lightning strike.
Now, this picture has a lot more foreground lighting (the city lights), and it isn’t a typical “lightning” photo, but it is using the lightning as one giant light source, so I’m guessing it would have been taken with a much wider aperture, f/4 - f/5.6 with a a shutter speed dependent on the ISO (say 1/2 to 1 second at ISO 200). The photo does seem a little noisy to me, but I can’t venture a guess on the ISO, as the photo is also oversharpened to holy hell. On a 5D, that looks like noise of about 1600ISO, possibly even 3200, but it doesn’t make any sense to me that a photographer would be shooting at such a high ISO with a tripod for a picture like that.
