January Storms 2022

On January 27 and 28 there were epic storms over south eastern Australia with areas in Victoria that received damage and flooding.

In Bendigo however, there was minimal damage and no real flooding.

Over these few days I managed to get some time lapse of the storms, capture some lightning, test out a few features on my camera, get rained on (a welcome relief from the heat and humidity) and swat away a collection of insects that required constant movement to not get attacked!

Storm clouds with two lightning bolts

Image captured using the Live Composit mode on the OMD EM1 MK11

The blues in the storm on the 28th were just amazing! This is a location not too far from home that I can get wide views of the weather coming from the north, west and south. New for this visit were it a lot of flies and later mosquitoes!

Storm time lapse

In the short video below you can check out some of the cloud and storm activity during the time I was out shooting and aiming to capture some bolts of lightning.

Time lapse were setup to capture every 10 seconds and I used a magnetic GoPro mount to stick it to the roof or side of the car.

Storm Gallery

The gallery below is a selection of the better photos I captured on my three outings in two days shooting and enjoying the show.

Most of the images were captured using the Live Composite mode that captures light over a set interval that gave an amazing painted look to the clouds when they were moving. I use this mode at times when there is too much light for a normal long exposure. The end result is often not as true to what the scene looked like but more of an abstract version that you can easily see below.

Other methods of capture were using Pro Capture mode, 60 fps with 15 buffered before shutter press, and normal long exposures when the light dropped with exposure times of five seconds to avoid blurring the clouds too much.

On the News

The large single electric purple photo was tagged with #janesweather on instagram/twitter and was selected for the background during the weather report for Melbourne news today - Jan 31 2020

Joel Bramley