This afternoon, after a day and a half of strenous garden work, ProfessorRoush quit working and took a number of photos to convince himself, and all of you, that Spring was beginning in Kansas. I was sidetracked, however, by the quick appearance of a small storm with a negligible offering of rainwater, but a little bit of lightning and thunder.
Many of you will remember how excited I was last year to accidentally capture a lightning bolt while I was taking prairie-storm pictures (if not,
it's HERE). Least year's photo was indeed fortuitous, and at the same time it was likely the end of an era, for this year, there is a new app for iPhone that will capture lightning, fireworks, gunshot flares, and other flashing phenomena. You see, folks, some genius has taken the luck right out of it and now everyone will have their own lightning pictures.
I read about the app, called
iLightningCam, a couple of weeks ago and the wait since for a thunderstorm has been near unbearable. Just a few moments ago, as the sky darkened and the flashes began, out I went onto the covered porch to see if it worked...and within 5 minutes, I had the picture above, a bolt of lightning flashing over my slowly greening and newly cleaned south garden beds. Lightning pictures are now idiot-proof and I have the evidence.
The
iLightningCam app is inexpensive (disclaimer; I get no sales revenue from mentioning it), works on both iPhone 4 & 5, and is simple to use. There is a trial Lite free version as well. It claims to use the iPhone light sensor to set off the camera, but I theorize that it is running a continuous loop of video and just capturing some set of frames that were taken just before a spike of light notifies it that there has been a flash. At least that's what I believe the "15fps" in the upper left corner of my screen indicates.
Once I get over my initial excitement with the app, I'm going to try to get more artistic with garden lightning combination photos, but for now, I'm still a kid in the candy store; a kid with the gift of magic bestowed by an iPhone genius named Florian Stiassny. As my Jeep tire cover says, "Life is Good."
Oh, dear! As you can see, ProfessorRoush was gone from home for several days, but came back just in time to play with his iLightningcam iPhone app. I thought this was the best shot of the evening and it should therefore lead the blog. I just love the blues and purples that are brought out in the photos.
I got home in the early evening, quickly mowed the worst of the overgrown grass in front of the house, and was witness to this lovely sunset:
We didn't get much rain with this system, but at least I got a little fun out of it. If you're wondering how long it takes to capture these, I had all of these within about 5 minutes of turning on the camera. As I wrote before about this iPhone app, it is also supposed to be good at capturing fireworks and this coming July 4th will be my first opportunity to test it. You can be sure I won't miss it!
