Lighting strike over Cliff Palace - a photo on Flickriver

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Thanks to all you readers and friends who have kept up with us and continued visiting over the past month. It seems like the three of us have been scattered, out on vacation, starting new academic programs and the like. As I mentioned in a post last Tuesday, I was lucky enough to attend a great scientific conference in Santa Fe and enjoy the sights and sounds of another city. After the conference, I took full advantage of my unusual geographic location (for me) to head to Mesa Verde National Park.

Everyone has seen photographs of these incredible cliff dwellings built by the ancestral Pueblo people between 1100 and 1300 A.D. – but seeing them in person, one can’t help but stand in awe. Built over eight centuries ago, these structures provided countless advantages to their architects. Spend a few days touring the area and you discover a few of these advantages yourself. Take, for example, the late summer thunderstorms, which build and strike almost every single day just after high noon, like clockwork. Lighting strikes and rain batter the mesa top, but inside Cliff Palace an Anasazi would be warm and dry.

A word about how these images were made – if you click through the images, you’ll notice that the image on flickr isn’t very high-resolution. This is because I shot these from across the canyon with a fisheye … hehe. I didn’t like the thought of standing next to a six-foot lightning rod, … er tripod, and a telephoto while this mother of a storm was rolling through. Moreover, the lighting strikes were coming all over the place and I didn’t want to frame the wrong thing, so I left the fisheye on the front of the camera and put about 40% of the sky in the frame. I was perfectly safe where I was standing but I didn’t want to linger for long – so I just tried to anticipate the lighting and fire when I saw the first strike. Because it was about 2 PM, all I needed to do was get extremely lucky! I dragged the shutter as much as I could (each exposure is about 1/40 of a second) while keeping the sky underexposed by at least a stop (a properly exposed sky will nearly swallow the signal from the lighting in the daytime).

Unfortunately, though for obvious reasons, they close these roads and the dwellings at sunset, otherwise it would be fun to set up a remote rig in a storm and get some long exposure lighting and cliff dwelling goodness.

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Taken on: September 4, 2009

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kern.justin

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Sets appears in: • The Windy Pixel • The West more » • The Windy Pixel • September (tWp) • Windy Pixel Faves « less

Camera: Nikon D700, f/5.6, 1/40 sec, 50mm, ISO 100 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Nikon D700
Lens:	0.0 mm f/0.0
Aperture:	f/5.6
Exposure Time:	0.025 sec (1/40)
Focal Length:	50mm
ISO:	100
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	No Flash
Exposure Program:	Aperture-priority AE
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Manual
Light Source:	Fine Weather
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	Adobe Photoshop CS4 Macintosh
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