There are a lot of lightning photos out there, and some are really beautiful (if you have a recent Mac computer, just look in your pre-installed desktop wallpaper folder!). But this is the only one I've ever managed to take, and there are some things I think are interesting about it.

For one thing, the bolt is right in the middle of the frame, and it's hitting flat water - it seems to defy the laws of physics. For another, if you can believe it I took this with an old Kodak Instamatic 110 format camera. This was a fully automatic camera with no shutter speed or aperture controls, and a very small film frame. Lightning photos are almost always very long exposures - this was a handheld snapshot in the dark!

This is the original color of this photo. These are dried flowers.

Fun with the Photoshop channel mixer

This is an original photo I took as part of my trek across the Queensboro Bridge during the transit strike. As you may have seen earlier, I converted most of my daytime shots to black and white because the lighting was a bit flat that day. If you're a photographer and you're like me, whenever you convert to black and white you probably either just desaturate and adjust curves or you convert to a grayscale image. But Photoshop CS2 has a better way.

Photoshop now has a quick and easy way of simulating the use of colored filters on black and white film - the channel mixer. Check it out - these are b/w versions of the image above, with different settings:


The photo above is with blue set to 100, red and green 0 - looks like a foggy day, doesn't it?


That's red 100, blue and green 0.

You used to be able to simulate this by creating a bunch of layers based on different channels and adjusting them individually, but this took me literally 1 minute total using the channel mixer. The self portrait at the top right was done the same way (that's about 60% blue, 20% green, 20% red). Using the channel mixer, it's incredibly easy to simulate the use of color filters (in any combination you like) and their effects on contrast and depth in b/w photos long after taking the shot.