Stars, Storms, and Swells

After seeing bountiful lightning on my way home from work at night, I decided pretty quickly to go take pictures at the lake. I swung by my house to pick up my gear and was off. It started raining the moment I got back into my car, and I thought that was a great sign. I wouldn’t really mind being in the rain. I had a raincoat and my backpack has a rainfly. My camera is weather sealed, but I could still put my hat on top of it or something.

Of course by the time I arrived to the beach, around 1:00 AM, the rain had stopped and so had the lightning. After looking around and taking some test exposures, I noticed the scene to my south.

From left to right shows the air pollution glowing above the city of Grand Haven, rendering the dunes of Hoffmaster as a silhouette. The two red dots are from a cellular tower upon ‘five mile hill’ named for being able to see at least five miles into the distance from the top. The lights on the shore from beach homes. A line of lights is emitted from the Grand Haven pier, which is 12 miles away. A massive stormfront that one could mistake for a mountain range looms over a large region. The smokestack and light pollution of the JH Campbell power plant is clearly visible from 23 miles away. Above and in front all of this appears to be a faint rain cloud dropping some rain.

It was while setting up this photo that I saw the first flash of lightning over the lake. As soon as I had a shot that would work, I changed gears and set up on the pier for lightning. I set my wide angle zoom lens as wide as possible (14mm) and started a sequence of 20-30 second exposures using the built-intervalometer in my camera. All I had to do once I found my composition and focus was to set it and forget. If lightning struck, it would show up in the long exposure. One of the photos even had two lightning strikes in the same exposure.

While the storm in the distance raged on, the skies above began to clear up. I was stoked to get a photo with two lightning strikes, and the stars.

I’m fairly certain that the glow above the horizon is the light pollution of Milwaukee, and other coastal Wisconsin cities. If I were to speculate even further, its yellow appearance is due to the same reason sunsets are red. A phenomenon known as Rayleigh scattering, where the longer wavelengths of light (yellow, orange and red) are able to travel further because they don’t get impeded by the atmosphere as much as other colors.

With eyes adjusted to the darkness, even car headlights from a half mile away feel like a spotlight and are quite startling. Despite this, the stars above the lake were far more visible than in my backyard, where light pollution is almost as bad as it gets. I’m quite glad I made a split second decision to go out and take photos. Even though it doesn’t turn out productive every time, I was very satisfied with the results this time.