This time of year you can pretty much set your clocks by the afternoon thunderstorms in Florida. We get a lot of them on the central east coast due to the sea breeze and the geography of the area. Bill and I went out to try and get some lightning shots Tuesday afternoon but by the time we got to a good location it was already pouring. I shot a few frames from inside the car where my Canon 5D was protected from becoming an over-sized paper weight. The following photo is my latest HDR photo taken like all the others from past posts… basically, the camera was set to bracket mode with +/- 2.0 EV and the drive mode set to multi-shot. I hand held the camera with my elbows braced on the interior of the car for stability. I used Photoshop CS3 to merge the three photos into an HDR file and saved it in Radiance format. I then used Photomatix Pro to do one round of tone mapping and then saved it as a 16-bit TIFF. Then I took it back into Photoshop CS3 for minor touch ups and framing.

The next photo is a quick shot I took while the car was moving. I like how the lights on all the vehicles turned out. I really over did the processing on this because I like the harsher look to it. It was all done in Lightroom 2.0’s ‘develop’ mode. I basically maxed out the contrast, recovery, fill light, and blacks sliders. Then dropped the saturation a bit and adjusted the brightness and exposure sliders until I got the right look. I then exported it to a PSD file, opened it in Photoshop CS3, did the framing and sharpening, and saved it out as a JPEG for posting. Simple stuff.

Bill posted a good shot he got of a storm yesterday. I was not out on that trip but it looks like I should have been. Check it out on his blog.