If lightning is the anger of the gods, they care mostly about trees

August 4, 2017 12:53 AM

Taking a photo of a lightning strike is difficult, as is creating a gigapixel image. Doing both together is pretty much impossible - you need multiple exposures stitched together for the gigapixel image. Dan Piech's blog covers in exhaustive detail how he created a photographic artwork of a lightning strike with a resolution of 5,449 megapixels.
posted by Stark (11 comments total)

The photos are awesome, but lightning is one force of nature that scares me silly. We had a strike on a large maple that stood about thirty feet from our back door a few years ago. It blew off some of the bark of the tree, much of which ended up hitting the door.

I'd just gotten up sometime around 11 PM to visit the bathroom when it hit. It was bright as day for that brief moment, and the thunder that accompanied the strike was likely the loudest sound I've ever heard. It got my attention.

Sadly, the tree had to come down as it was plenty large enough to take out our house or the neighbor's. Maybe both depending on how it fell. The strike was close enough to our electric service line that it fried our telephone, the only thing we hadn't unplugged when we learned a storm was on the way.

So, the photos are pretty cool, the technique for capturing them interesting. The lightning itself, as awesome as it is, I'd just as soon experience there, rather than in the back yard.
posted by metagnathous at 3:35 AM on August 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

If lightning is the anger of the gods, they care mostly about trees

Also, fish.
posted by acb at 4:09 AM on August 4, 2017 [2 favorites]

And cows. Lot of cows. Though that's typically because they cluster under the trees to get out of the rain.
posted by Naberius at 5:02 AM on August 4, 2017

That was a neat read. I'm an artist, but I specialize in different media, so it was interesting to learn how one might go about significantly sizing up such a photo.
posted by vegartanipla at 5:28 AM on August 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

At 5:11pm on July 25, 2016, New York City witnessed one of the most impressive lightning strikes ever photographed.

I was sitting in the Newark airport when this happened and man was it intense.
posted by chavenet at 5:29 AM on August 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

I was sitting in my garage with the door open one night during a thunderstorm, just watching and listening to the rain and thunder. Most of the strikes were far away so I heard only distant rumbles, but the storm was moving my way.

Eventually some lightning struck very close to me and it was the loudest boom I ever heard. Like-- KRA-KOOOOOOOM!!!!!--I actually jumped out of my chair and screamed in surprise. And then another one came. And another.

It sounded like the end of the world. All I could think was, "this is why my ancestors believed in gods and demons".

Lightning is amazing but I concur, it's scary as fuck
posted by Doleful Creature at 5:49 AM on August 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

This is very impressive, but I don't really comfortable calling the end result a photograph. Digital photographic artwork, maybe, but there is so much (manual and automated) work and effort and processing that went into the end result, that it's really not a photograph any more - and that's setting aside the fact that the main subject matter was composited from 111 separate exposures.
posted by kcds at 6:24 AM on August 4, 2017 [11 favorites]

I had the same feeling. In the last stages of the process he paints the exploding tree and the lightning bolt that goes into it. He also draws the main bolt (and the halo), adds (street lights) and removes (people) elements. It's a digital composition rather than a photograph.
posted by elgilito at 7:42 AM on August 4, 2017 [6 favorites]

I agree the final work is heavily manipulated, I just don't much care. It doesn't make it any less interesting an artwork. And he's not pretending he's not editing. There's no such thing as a "true unaltered photograph" anyway, analog or digital.

What I don't like is the cliche image. I understand how challenging the photo is to take, but "lightning bolt on dark sky" has been done an awful lot. OTOH it is a very nicely exposed image, the super dark sky with buildings visible. I also like the open composition; it's a city skyline, but without a dense jumble, the view across the water.

He offers a 599x404" print. That would be something to see, should you have a 50 foot long sofa you need to hang some art over.
posted by Nelson at 7:56 AM on August 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

While it's true that there's no such thing as a "true" photograph, there's definitely such a thing as false photographs, and the photographer was really, really trying to make the high rez version match the first, rather than taking wild liberties or anything.

I found reading his process fascinating and enjoyable, much more so than the picture itself, though maybe it's something you need to see in it's absurdly high rez glory to fully appreciate.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 8:46 AM on August 4, 2017 [3 favorites]

For what it's worth, I tried to avoid the "is it a photograph or is it a piece of created artwork" by referring to it as a "photographic artwork". Every piece of commercial photography sits on a scale between straight out of the camera to unrecognisably processed/manipulated/assembled. I think the debate about where a particular created work sits on that scale isn't always useful.
posted by Stark at 11:15 AM on August 6, 2017